


One Night at Quark's

by cosmic_llin



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Backstory, Female Friendship, Gen, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 23:50:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7013578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The women of the Enterprise and DS9 take a night off from the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set late in Season 6 of DS9, sometime after 6x19, In the Pale Moonlight.

It was supposed to be a quick, quiet drink.

That was really all they had time for – the Enterprise was at Deep Space Nine while the fleet regrouped there and awaited new orders, but there was still plenty to do until then. Beverly felt bad leaving at all, but she’d been stuck in Sickbay for weeks, hardly stopping from one battle to the next, and an hour off couldn’t hurt. A walk on the promenade, a brief catch-up with Keiko, and then back to get in another couple of hours’ work before bed.

When Deanna heard she was seeing Keiko, she asked if she could come too. And it turned out Guinan wanted to check out the competition at Quark’s, so it made sense for her to come along.

* * *

‘Commander Troi is going to be there?’ Jadzia said. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet her! She sounds like such an interesting person.’

Keiko rolled her eyes. ‘You just want to gossip about Worf.’

‘Ah, nothing gets past you,’ said Jadzia. ‘Can I come? Please? I promise I won’t show you up in front of your fancy Enterprise friends.’

‘You better not,’ said Keiko, smothering a grin.

‘Hey, do you think Nerys wants to come?’

* * *

At the appointed hour there were eight of them there, taking up three pushed-together tables on one of the upper tiers of Quark’s Bar, Grill, Gaming House and Holosuite Arcade. Beverly had decided that Alyssa was even more in need of a break than she was and decided to bring her along. Nerys had bumped into Kasidy on the promenade and invited her too. Greetings, hugs and introductions were exchanged, Leeta came over to take their orders in between working the dabo table, and they settled into conversation.

‘I hear the Enterprise took some heavy damage last week,’ said Nerys.

Beverly nodded. ‘Yes, it was a surprise attack. We managed to get away without serious casualties. Luckily Deanna was in command on the bridge at the time.’

‘It was nothing,’ said Deanna. ‘But let’s not talk about the war.’

‘Keiko,’ said Guinan. ‘How’s Molly doing? And the new baby?’

Keiko grinned. ‘Not so new any more – he’s growing so fast we can hardly keep up. And Molly’s great. She hates all the travelling back and forth though. We’ve been staying on Earth a lot but she misses the station. Nerys got her a book of Bajoran folk tales and she demands that I read them to her every night when we’re away.’

Nerys and Keiko exchanged fond smiles.

A shadow fell over the table. ‘May I join you?’ it asked.

Deanna gasped and jumped from her seat to fling herself at the newcomer. ‘Kate! I thought you were three sectors away!’

Kate Pulaski returned Deanna’s hug with enthusiasm and moved around the table to greet everyone else.

‘I was,’ she said, ‘but the Merit Ptah was ordered here to transfer some patients. We’re staying until the fleet moves on.’

‘Well, pull up a chair!’ said Beverly.

Without being asked, Leeta brought up another round of drinks.

The evening wore on. Jadzia switched seats with Beverly so that she and Deanna could compare notes about Worf while Beverly, Keiko and Nerys chatted about Bajor’s native plants. Kate leaned across the table on her elbows to hear Kasidy’s explanation of the rules of baseball.

More drinks arrived, along with several orders of sand peas, katterpod fries and dried moba.

Alyssa got talking to Nerys about a composer they both liked. Guinan and Kasidy started swapping stories about life as civilians working with Starfleet, and when the anecdotes descended into dirty jokes, Kate and Jadzia joined in.

None of them noticed the bar emptying until Quark came up the stairs.

‘Ah, ladies...’ he said. ‘I need to close the bar. Everyone else has gone home!’

They looked around them at the chairs stacked on tables for the night.

‘Come on, Quark!’ Jadzia protested. ‘We’re just getting started! Let us lock up when we’re done. You can trust me, can’t you?’

‘Yeah, I trust you,’ said Quark. ‘I trust you to lead all these other law-abiding officers astray. You can’t be here without supervision and I’m not staying. Do you know what time I have to get up in them morning?'

‘I’ll stay,’ said Leeta, who was cleaning one of the tables nearby.

Quark frowned. ‘You won’t get paid for it.’

‘I don’t mind!’ she said. ‘Come on, Quark... I’ll make sure they buy plenty of drinks?’

She gave him a winning smile and he threw up his hands.

‘Fine, but if everything in here isn’t perfect when I get back tomorrow morning...’

‘It will be,’ said Jadzia, ‘on our honour as Starfleet officers.’

‘And Bajoran militia,’ added Nerys.

‘And civilians!’ Kasidy said.

Quark just rolled his eyes and left.

‘Pull up a chair, Leeta!’ said Kate. ‘You definitely deserve to sit down.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Jadzia. ‘I’ll go down to the bar and get us another bottle.’

‘Sorry for all the extra work we’ve made for you this evening,’ said Beverly.

Leeta grinned. ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re a lot nicer than some of the other patrons tonight. That Bolian at the dabo table earlier could have done with learning some manners.'

‘Doesn’t it annoy you, the way people behave to towards you?’ Beverly asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Leeta said, gratefully taking a glass from Jadzia, who had returned with four bottles of Quark’s nicest spring wine. ‘But every job has its ups and downs. I have fun, I meet a lot of interesting people, and I’m good at what I do. I love my job.’

‘How did you get started?’ asked Deanna. ‘What made you want to be a dabo girl?’

‘Well,’ said Leeta. ‘It was like this...’


	2. Chapter 2

She’d never been unhappy at the orphanage. It was a rundown house in a rundown town and there was never quite enough to eat and their clothes were always threadbare, but Leeta didn’t know anyone whose life was much different. She loved the carers who looked after them and she had lots of friends among the other children and she enjoyed her lessons and her play. She didn’t have any family, but then neither did most of the other kids, even if some of them did have family names and d’jarras. Who cared about d’jarras anyway? They were only good for telling you what job to do, andonce she was old enough, either the Cardassians would take her to work in one of their mines or factories, or she’d get some other kind of job in town. There was no point worrying about it.

She was three months short of her itanu when she changed her mind.

The older children – Leeta included, these last couple of years – were allowed to go into town, such as it was. There wasn’t anything there except a few half-empty stores, plenty more boarded up and silent, and a couple of taverns that the children weren’t allowed inside and that always smelled weird anyway. But it was somewhere to go, so they went. They sat on the broken ruins of the old fountain and talked, they lay in the sunshine on the stubbly grass by the temple that nobody was allowed to pray in any more, they ran up and down the streets chasing each other and annoying the adults on market day. They steered clear of the Cardassians that occasionally showed up, but they weren’t there a lot – the province was poor and remote and not really worth the effort of a full-time base.

Then Boryl Nessa came to town.

Leeta had gotten bored of playing by the stream with the others and walked into town to see if anything was happening, not really expecting anything much more interesting than a vendor selling jumja sticks or a hara cat on the loose. But when she reached the single main street, something was different. A scrap of bright colour caught her eye. She went closer.

One of the boarded-up shops wasn’t boarded up any more. The doors were wide open and a woman in a bright red dress was sweeping the floor inside. There were coloured streamers hanging around the doorway, and a yellow notice board outside that said: Nessa’s Cafe – opening soon. Leeta’s heart skipped a beat.

‘Hey!’ called the woman inside. ‘Girl!’

Leeta went inside.

‘Yes, aunt?’ she asked – it was a small and old-fashioned enough town that children still addressed their elders that way.

‘How would you like to earn a few litas helping me to clear up in here?’

They spent the rest of the afternoon working, and Leeta went back every day that week to help get the cafe ready. Nessa had bright yellow tablecloths and red curtains and prints that she put up on the walls. Leeta had never seen so much colour in one place before.

Nessa gave her fliers to distribute, announcing a grand opening. There was going to be free food and drink.

'How can you afford it?' Leeta asked.

Nessa shrugged. 'I have a little money saved, here and there.'

'Then why don't you start your cafe somewhere exciting, like llvia or Jalanda City?'

'And get shut down by the Cardassians, or worse, have to serve them? No, I tried that, I didn't like it much. I want to run my cafe the Bajoran way, where Bajorans can appreciate it. I know people here can't afford much, but they still need somewhere to go for fun – somewhere to forget their troubles. Now, make sure you take those fliers _everywhere_ – I want the opening to be packed.'

* * *

Leeta did as she was told, running from one end of the town to the other, pushing a flier into the hands of anyone she met, sliding them under doors, passing them through open windows.

When the opening arrived, Nessa pressed her into service as a waitress. She gave her a sunshine-yellow apron to wear over her normal clothes. Leeta held still as Nessa tied the strings, feeling like a sprite from the stories they told at the orphanage, or one of the heroes from old myths. She twirled.

'Remember the most important thing,' said Nessa. 'Smile, smile, smile.'

Leeta didn't find that difficult. She smiled at the first customer who arrived, she smiled as she carried drinks and plates back and forth, she smiled as one of the old jumja sellers got out his belaklavion and started to play, and half a dozen people started singing. She smiled at the younger children running between the tables, she smiled at the adults yelling at them. She couldn't stop smiling, even after she and Nessa shooed out the last stragglers and stood in the golden-lit doorway, looking out at the dark street.

'You did a good job today,' said Nessa. 'Want to come and work for me permanently? It won't always be as fun as this.'

Leeta didn't even hesitate.

* * *

‘So, that’s how I ended up working in hospitality,’ Leeta said. ‘And I’ve never looked back since. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect career.’

‘It has its moments,’ agreed Guinan, with a small smile.

‘How did you get started, Guinan?’ Leeta asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Guinan. ‘I’ve done a lot of different things over the years. I just sort of drifted into it. And maybe someday I’ll drift out again and try something else, who knows? I’m almost six hundred years old and I’m still not sure what I want to do when I grow up.’

‘Sometimes I feel that way,’ said Nerys. ‘I guess I never really chose a career, I just turned up when they were asking for competent resistance fighters to join the provisional government's new militia... honestly I didn’t think it would last more than five minutes, but here I still am.’

‘But you like it, don’t you?’ Keiko asked.

‘I love it,’ said Nerys. ‘But you know, someday I might want to do something different. Who knows?'

‘Well, if you ever want to learn bartending, give me a call,’ said Guinan.

Jadzia laughed. ‘Can you imagine Nerys dealing with rude customers? She’d have to set up her bar right next to the infirmary...’

‘Oh, that’s very funny, Jadzia,’ said Nerys, mock-frowning. ‘Let’s talk about something else? Keiko, when did you decide to become a botanist?’

‘You know, I remember the exact day,’ said Keiko. ‘I was eight. My class were on a field trip to Luna. And I was in a bad mood. I’d never visited Luna before and I wanted to explore, but we just went on this endless tour of the government building in Tycho City, and it was just like any old building on Earth. Then after that we went to see one of the old terraforming domes – you know, the ones they converted into giant greenhouses? And I know it’s hard to imagine now, but I found the plants so dull. We just walked and walked past all these trees and bushes that looked exactly the same, and the tour guide leading us was giving this endless talk about which plants grew best on Luna and why, and I got bored and wandered off. And I was feeling kind of mutinous, so I snuck past the barriers and went further into the greenhouse than we were supposed to.’

‘Keiko, I never had you down as a rule breaker!’ said Kate.

Keiko grinned. ‘I was a handful. Anyway, I figured there must be something more interesting in there than what we were getting to see... and I was right. I walked straight into an Andorian trapper plant.’

‘As in... _into_ one?’ Beverly asked.

‘Exactly,’ said Keiko. ‘Well, at first I just brushed past it, I had no idea what it was – and the next thing I knew it’d grabbed me with its vines and was trying to swallow me. I screamed for help, and struggled, and that just made it pull me further in. By the time Miura-sensei and the rest of the class got there, I was stuck up to my shoulders.’

‘What happened?’ said Alyssa.

‘They called one of the botanists working there and she got me free,’ said Keiko. ‘They couldn’t just cut me out because that would trigger the plant’s threat response and it would spray acid everywhere, so she had to inject it with chemicals to trick it into thinking it had already fed. She explained the whole process to me while she worked, and by the time it loosened its grip and dropped me, I was hooked. While the rest of the class finished the tour, she took me back to her lab to hose the digestive fluids off me and have the base doctor check me over, but I could hardly keep still long enough for him to regenerate the places where it had burnt my skin. I was too busy running around the lab in a borrowed uniform about ten times too big for me, looking at everything I could. The botanist loaded a dozen botany textbooks onto my PADD for me and I read on the shuttle all the way home, and by the time I went to sleep that night I’d decided that I would be a botanist too when I grew up. I still have kind of a soft spot for carnivorous plants.’

They laughed. Jadzia topped up everyone’s glasses.

‘So, who else has a story about how they chose their career?’ she asked. ‘Deanna? How did you know you wanted to be a counselor?’

‘Actually I wanted to be a Starfleet officer, first of all,’ Deanna said. ‘My father was an engineer in Starfleet. When I was little and he was offworld, he used to send me messages all about what was happening on the ship, and ask me what I thought he should do about it. When he was home, we’d make things together, just little engineering projects and science experiments. I was so young when he died that I don’t remember much, but I kept a few of the things we made together. And I never stopped wanting to join Starfleet. Once he was gone I wanted it more, because it was a way to stay connected to him. I read every book about Starfleet I could get my hands on. I was going to try for engineering, like him, then someday switch to the command track.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Nerys, leaning forward with her chin on her hands.

‘My mother happened,’ said Deanna, with a rueful smile. ‘I can understand it. When my father died it hit her very hard. It was in the line of duty, and as far as she was concerned, Starfleet had taken him away from her. And there I was, wanting to go out there and put myself in danger as well? She forbade it. She ordered me to choose something else, and my teachers said I should think about training to be a counselor – they were at something of a loss to know what else to with a child who could read emotions but not thoughts. Naturally careers on Betazed often require some level of telepathic ability, and I knew that in most workplaces I’d be just as left out as I... I probably wouldn’t be able to participate fully. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took their advice and took a preliminary psychology course.’

‘And?’ said Jadzia.

‘And I loved it,’ said Deanna. ‘I didn’t expect to, but I was fascinated by it. I knew I’d found what I wanted to do, but I also knew that I couldn’t do it on Betazed. There were whispers in my class... how could I help my clients if I couldn’t even read their thoughts? It didn’t matter that I learned everything I could, that I came top in every test. Even my teachers suggested that working with offworlders might be better. So I finally persuaded my mother to let me join Starfleet as a counselor. That was back when all of our counselors were on bases, and I promised her that I would only go for assignments in safe places, no far-off outposts on the edges of the Federation. And she gave me permission to apply to the Academy, and off I went.’

‘What happened to the safe assignments?’ Kasidy asked.

Deanna shrugged. ‘Once I heard that they were going to start taking counselors on starships, that was it. Mother didn’t speak to me for a week, but she got over it.’ She looked up, smiled a little wearily. ‘All right, who’s next? Jadzia?’

Jadzia laughed and shook her head. ‘It’s much too complicated and not that interesting. How about Alyssa?’

Alyssa made a face.

‘Go on, Alyssa,’ Beverly said encouragingly.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Alyssa. ‘Well... I sort of fell into it by accident, kind of like Deanna did. I was the eldest of six children. My dad was an extreme hydrosailer and my moms both played parrises squares at championship level. All of my siblings played dangerous sports or did some other reckless thing. I was the only one who preferred to stay indoors and read a book. So I was always at home when people came back with cuts and bruises, and I learned how to use the dermal regenerator we kept in the bathroom cabinet and the antibiotic hyposprays... and I enjoyed it. It’s nice being able to help people and fix problems. And then I decided I wanted to see a bit of the galaxy. I find travelling kind of stressful because of all the packing up and moving around all the time, and I thought living on a starship would be a good way to travel and still be settled. And, well, here I am years later still living on the Enterprise, and I wouldn’t change a thing.’

‘You know,’ said Kasidy, ‘I’m just the opposite. I hate being settled. I love not knowing where I’ll be in a week or a month.’

Alyssa grimaced. ‘I can’t even imagine it.’

* * *

There was nothing to do on the entire Cestus III colony. Even if you could get a slot on the overtaxed public transporters to go to Pike City for the day, that was only slightly more exciting than going into town on hoverbikes and getting milkshakes after school, which was what Kasidy and her friends did practically every day anyway.

Kasidy and her best friend Shanice used to get two different flavours of milkshake and each have half of each, and look at the pictures they had collected of all the places they planned to go. They’d make detailed itineraries and talk as if they were going any day, making packing lists and choosing what ship they’d travel on.

When they were twelve, they made a pact, sitting in a corner booth while the rain pattered against the glass roof.

‘We solemnly swear that when we’re old enough, we’ll get away from this place,’ said Shanice, ‘and explore the galaxy – but wherever we go, we’ll go together. We’ll never be apart. Do you swear?’

‘I swear,’ said Kasidy.

When they were fourteen, Shanice kissed Kasidy, and Kasidy kissed her back.

When they were fifteen they signed up for piloting lessons together. Shanice was a natural at the controls, but Kasidy picked up the navigation theory a lot quicker. They coached each other, learning from one another’s successes and failures.

When they were seventeen they both joined Cestus III’s sub-orbital freight company. They worked as pilot and copilot, switching from shift to shift. They shared an apartment and a bed in Pike City.

When they were nineteen, they had enough flight hours logged to pilot interstellar ships. They applied to the same half dozen shipping companies.

‘We’ll be copilots forever,’ said Kasidy, lying on the floor of their apartment, her fingers tangling in one of Shanice's curls. ‘Once all these companies accept us, we can pick the one we like best and explain that we’ll only fly together.’

Two weeks later Kasidy was accepted into Federation Freight, and Shanice was offered a position with Starline Cargo Services. They both waited as long as they could to confirm, but no positions came up for the two of them together.

* * *

‘... and then what happened?’ asked Leeta.

‘And then… we both lived our lives. I got promoted to captain, and then I started my own company. Shanice moved up the ranks and now she heads up a fleet of twelve ships.’

‘You keep in touch, then?’ Deanna asked.

Kasidy grinned. ‘Sure we do. We still send each other messages at least once a week, and we call whenever we’re in comm reach. I’m even her kid’s godmother. We may not see each other in person that much, but we’re still out here together, exploring like we planned.’


	3. Chapter 3

‘You know,’ said Beverly, ‘Cestus III sounds a little like Caldos, where I grew up. That was a small, dull colony too.’

Kasidy frowned. ‘Caldos… isn’t that…?’

‘The Scotland planet,’ Beverly confirmed with a sigh. ‘It’s all right, you can laugh. It’s pretty ridiculous.’

‘I think it’s cute,’ offered Jadzia.

‘Cute? That’s worse!’ said Beverly. ‘I guess you’re right, it does feel a little like a theme park, even when you live there. It was a shock to the system when I first arrived.’

‘You weren’t born there, then?’ Nerys asked.

‘No,’ Beverly shook her head. ‘I was born on Luna. After my parents died, my grandmother took me to make a fresh start on the Arvada III colony.’

There was a sudden hush around the table, a collective breath held.

‘Anyway,’ said Beverly, ‘I don’t want to talk about that part – but I guess given everything that happened there, I can see why Nana wanted to move us somewhere safe and quiet, and Caldos was about as safe and quiet as you could get. I was eleven when we arrived there.’

* * *

Beverly Howard didn't fit in on Caldos. Nothing about her was quite right. She was tall for her age, but gangly and awkward. She cried a lot. She hadn't heard of any of the music or holonovels that the other kids were interested in. She'd helped amputate a man's leg without proper anaesthesia but she didn't know how to play any playground games. She talked too readily about whatever was on her mind and she laughed at the wrong things.

When her therapist said she should do an extracurricular activity she picked dance because it was the only one that didn't immediately make her want to run away and hide – mostly because she thought maybe she could do it without talking to the other kids too much, and only slightly because of her hazy memories of enjoying it when she was much smaller, before everything was complicated. Maybe she was too clumsy for it anyway. Maybe if she was clumsy enough they'd kick her out and she could stay home listening to loud, angry music and feeling miserable like she wanted to.

The dance teacher thought she'd like Ktarian dance. It involved long, thin ribbons attached to her fingers, that waved in the air as she moved. When the teacher did it, it looked wonderful, graceful and ethereal. When Beverly did it, mostly the ribbons got tangled in knots and she fell over. The warm-ups, without the ribbons, were easier and harder at the same time – fast and energetic, they made her heart pound, made her sweat.

After a while, she started to remember that a pounding heart could be a good thing.

She still listened to loud, angry music, but now she moved with it instead of lying on her bed and letting it wash over her. When she danced, the anger that sat in her stomach like a stone streamed out of her instead, like smoke through her flickering fingers.

She practised with the ribbons. She got better at it. The music in class was gentler and smoother than her music at home. She liked both.

'It's not like it solves everything,' she told her therapist.

'But it helps?' they asked.

'It helps,' she agreed.

A boy from dance invited her to his birthday party. A girl who paired with her in the group pieces sat next to her at school one day. And she kept practising with the ribbons, until one day she could do it without getting tangled up in them. The ribbons whirled around her, like a forcefield. She could do this. She could do this.

* * *

‘Um… anyway, yes, it was kind of a quiet place,’ said Beverly, and she picked up her glass and finished her drink in one gulp.

‘You would never have caught me dancing at that age,’ said Kate. ‘I was a climbing girl. Always in trouble for it. I’d climb anything high, but mostly where I lived there were trees – so I climbed them.’

She settled in her seat, grinning at her audience. Beverly shot her a grateful look.

‘I ruined my clothes at least once a week,’ Kate continued. ‘I fell all the time. I scraped my knees, I bumped my head – I even broke my wrist once but it barely even slowed me down. Then Adelajda Bartoz – we hated each other, for no good reason that I can remember – dared me to climb the tallest tree in our neighbourhood.

‘I’d never really considered climbing that tree – I think mostly because I knew it would be too difficult and I wanted to pretend that I didn’t care – but once she dared me, I was determined. We all of us went down there, and I gave it my best shot, but I couldn’t even get started. The first branches were too high for me to reach. So Adelajda Bartoz laughed and called me names, and I swore that, no matter how long it took, I’d get to the top of that tree.

‘Well, I’d heard that some people could swarm up a tree – you know, climb it like you’d climb up a rope in gym class, just pulling yourself straight up – and I decided that I’d learn. So I researched, and I practised, but I did it all in secret. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing. So I went by myself into the woods after school most days and tried it out on the smaller trees. It took a long time to get the hang of it, and I came home every day with my arms about ready to drop off, and scratches all over them. But finally I could do it – I got to the top of the tree I’d been practising on, and then I tried it out on some bigger trees, and I kept going until I was pretty confident I’d be able to climb that big tree. And I waited until the day I knew a big gang of kids, Adelajda included, would be walking past there. And I climbed it before they all arrived, and I got up to the highest branch and just waited for them to show up.

‘While I waited I looked – oh, the view from up there, you wouldn’t believe. I’d never been up so high. Everything was laid out beneath me like a picture – I could see my house, but it looked too small to be real. Even given what happened next, it was all worth it for that.’

‘What happened next?’ asked Kasidy.

‘Oh god, I don’t want to know,’ said Alyssa, covering her face with her hands.

‘Well, Adelajda and the gang came around, and I yelled down at them, and they were pretty astonished to see me up there. I could hardly make out their faces, but I could tell Adelajda was fuming. I stayed up there for a few minutes, but I could see that my public awaited, so I started to climb down. And when I got to the lowest branch – remember, this was still pretty high – I started to show off. I balanced on the branch, I swung around, I wasn’t holding on properly and I’m sure you know what’s coming – I fell out of the tree.’

She paused for the gasps of mingled horror and appreciation.

‘I was knocked out cold for a few seconds,’ she continued. ‘And when I came to, all I could hear was Adelajda screaming that she’d killed me. And – I was a horrible child, I know – that kind of tickled me.

‘Anyway, the next time I woke up was in the hospital. I had concussion, two broken ribs, a broken pelvis and internal bleeding. But I’d climbed that tree. Adelajda visited me in hospital and brought me my body weight in candy. A month later I was climbing trees again like nothing had happened.’

‘Did you become friends after that?’ Alyssa asked.

Kate laughed. ‘No, she was nice to me for a few weeks and then we just kept right on hating each other until the end of high school, then I never saw her again. I think she’s a lawyer now. She was probably a nice enough kid really.’

They paused for a bathroom break and to fetch more bottles from the bar downstairs. The conversation lulled as they settled back into their seats and passed the drinks and snacks around.

‘I have a childhood story,’ blurted Nerys, her voice a little wobbly from all the drinks.

‘Go ahead, then!’ said Kasidy encouragingly.

‘It happened during the Peldor festival,’ Nerys said. ‘I must have been seven or eight. It was during a period when the Cardassians had relaxed the religious restrictions a little, so we were allowed to celebrate openly and burn renewal scrolls, but it was still forbidden to teach the word of the Prophets. But there was a vedek coming to the nearest big town, incognito. Word got around, and my father told my brothers and I that if we were good, we might get the chance to meet her and she would bless us.

‘So I spent the whole week trying my hardest to be good, and I just about succeeded, and when the day came, I got up extra early to make sure that I didn’t miss it. I put on my best clothes, and I actually brushed my hair, and I practised a poem my brother had been teaching me, just in case I had a chance to tell it to the vedek. I was ready to go before the sun had finished rising. I wanted to get going right away, but my father said there was no rush. He and my brothers decided to follow on a little later and go the long way around, see if they could do a little hunting on the way. I was allowed to walk to the festival by myself as long as I promised to follow the main road all the way and run and hide if I saw so much as one Cardassian.

‘I was determined to get there, so I didn’t let myself get distracted. I walked as fast as I could – I was sure I’d miss the vedek if I didn’t hurry. About halfway to the town, there was an old woman sitting at the side of the road. She waved me over, and I went to see what she needed, even though I was itching to keep going.

‘She asked me the way to the town. I told her it was straight down the road, and that I was headed that way myself. She suggested we should go there together.

‘So I helped her up and we started walking. She was a lot slower than I was. I could barely keep myself from pulling ahead. I kept thinking of the vedek, and how she must be there already, blessing people. But the old woman seemed nice and I didn’t want to leave her by herself when she was so slow and couldn’t run if there was trouble.

‘So we kept walking. She told me stories, but it was hard to pay attention properly. It seemed like we were getting slower and slower all the time. I watched the sun creeping up the sky, and I knew for sure that I was going to miss the vedek. Then the old woman suggested that we should stop for a minute to rest. What could I say? So we stopped. She gave me sweets, but I couldn’t enjoy them properly, I was too anxious.

‘I thought about telling her that I couldn’t wait, and running on ahead, but she seemed to be enjoying my company so much. And then I thought about how the Prophets move in mysterious ways. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to meet the vedek. Maybe I was supposed to help this old woman instead.

‘That thought helped. I tried to squash my impatience and listen to what the old woman was saying. Her stories were actually pretty good – she had some I hadn’t heard before, and even the familiar ones she told so well that they were like new.

‘She asked me then if I knew any stories. I thought of my poem. Part of me wanted to save it for the vedek, so that it would be special, but the old woman had told me so many good stories that it seemed rude not to tell her my best poem in return. So I recited it for her as we walked, and I tried to put my whole heart into it, and when I was finished, we reached the edge of town, where the festival was just beginning. I hadn’t missed anything – it wasn’t even mid-morning yet. I realised that I'd been pretty silly.

'The old woman thanked me profusely for accompanying her, I thanked her for the stories, and we parted ways. I went to the festival, found my father and brothers, ate sweets, danced, and finally word came that we could go to be blessed by the vedek.’

Nerys looked around the table, her smile dazzling.

‘It was her, of course. She smiled at me, and she laughed when I told her how worried I’d been that I would miss her, and she blessed me and my brothers and kissed and hugged us all and told my father how wonderfully I had recited my poem. I’ve never felt prouder in my life.’

‘Nerys,’ said Jadzia, ‘I think that might be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.’

Nerys blushed, grinned. ‘What about you, Jadzia?’ she said. ‘You’ve been very enthusiastic about everyone else’s stories, but we haven’t heard from you yet.’

Jadzia shrugged. ‘I don’t really think...’

‘It’s only fair, Jadzia,’ said Kasidy.

Jadzia sighed. ‘Oh, all right. Um… let me see… well… I guess I could tell you about Beeka. You see, when I was younger, I used to read a lot of books, and my absolute favourite thing was a series called Down the River Light – it’s an adventure story, and it’s seventeen volumes long, and I must have read that thing from cover to cover about a hundred times.

‘Anyway, one of the main characters was a brave, adventurous girl called Dessim. She had magical powers that allowed her to speak to animals, and she had lots of animal friends, but her best friend was a steppe hound called Beeka. They went everywhere together, and told each other everything, and Beeka could do all sorts of incredible things – she could walk on her hind legs, she could bark signals to communicate from far away, she could track by scent – she was wonderful.

‘I loved animals as a child, a lot more than I did people, sometimes, and I was desperate for a steppe hound of my own. I begged and begged my parents for months and years, until they finally decided I was old enough to learn to be responsible for a pet. We got a steppe hound, and naturally I named her Beeka.

‘We had her from when she was tiny, and I spent all of my free time playing with her. She followed me everywhere – I used to sneak treats into my pocket for her when my parents weren’t looking, and she’d follow that pocket with her nose all day long.

‘I used to wish and wish that I could communicate with animals like Dessim did in the books, and that Beeka could talk to me, but I knew that was just pretend. But I was pretty sure I could get Beeka to do some of the other things the Beeka in the books did. I tried to train her to bark signals and walk on her hind legs, but she never seemed to quite get it. She never remembered the things I tried to teach her. It frustrated me, but I loved her. I just wished she could be more like what I wanted.

‘Anyway, I took her for a walk one day and got caught in a rain storm. The ground was slippy, and I fell down a hill and hurt myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d broken my ankle. All I knew was that I couldn’t move. Beeka followed me down, slipping in the mud herself.

‘I tried to tell her to get help. Beeka in the books would have known, she would have fetched someone to get me home. She would have managed to tell someone what had happened. But my Beeka didn’t even try. She just lay down next to me. I kept telling her to go, to find my parents or my sister, but she just pushed closer to me, and then she lay on top of me, and I realised that she was sheltering me from the rain.

‘She stayed there, keeping me warm, until an hour later when we heard the search party calling my name. And then she started barking – and it was just like Beeka in the books. When she barked her signal they came running to find us.

‘Looking back now, I guess it wasn’t such a big deal, but at the time I really thought Beeka had saved my life.’

Jadzia looked up, blushing. ‘OK, that’s it – someone else’s turn now. Who else hasn’t been? Guinan?’

Guinan smiled. ‘My childhood was a pretty long time ago, but let’s see… I could tell you about my Uncle Terkim. He used to take care of me a couple of days a week, when I was small. Nobody but me seemed to like him very much. He wasn’t serious enough, they said. He didn’t listen properly. I’m sure you can imagine that not listening properly is about the most serious personality flaw an El-Aurian can have. But I liked it – he and I would jump on the furniture, run around shouting, throw things, have water fights in his garden – and he'd never tell me to be quiet and listen. Until one day, he did.

'I arrived in the morning as usual, and I noticed that he looked kind of serious. He said that he thought I was old enough now to be quiet and listen, and that from now on whenever I went there we'd do meditation practice to help me find my inner calm. I was disappointed, but what could I say? I followed him in and he settled me down on a meditation mat with some chime music to focus on. He told me to sit for a few minutes, just listening to the chimes and the ambient noise, and he'd go get some refreshments before we did a more intensive meditation.

'I sat, I closed my eyes, I concentrated on the chimes, trying to really, _really_ listen. Trying to slow my breathing, focus outside myself, let the universe in, everything all the other adults were trying so hard to get me to learn. I tried to forget how disappointed I was that Uncle Terkim had turned out to be just like the others. I tried to convince myself that I didn't feel betrayed. He was just trying to help me be a good El-Aurian.

'So I listened to the chimes. I _strained_ to listen to them. If I could have opened my ears wider, I would have.

'Then I heard a noise like nothing I'd ever heard in my life before – a blaring horn, right in my ear, so loud that I screamed and almost jumped out of my skin. I opened my eyes, gasping, and there was Uncle Terkim, grinning at me. He'd acquired a boathorn from a sailor and he'd been thinking all week of the best way to demonstrate it to me, and this was what he'd come up with.

'I was furious. I'd never _been_ so angry. But I got over it. And we had some good times with that boathorn.'

Guinan grinned around the table. 'It's good to see you all laughing,' she said.


	4. Chapter 4

'Your Uncle Terkim would have liked my sister,' said Jadzia. 'When we were children she was always playing tricks on people.'

Beverly leaned forward eagerly. 'Tell us one?'

Jadzia shook her head. 'I just told a story, it can't be my turn again?'

'Just a quick one, Jadzia,' Nerys wheedled. 'And then we'll leave you alone.'

Jadzia rolled her eyes. 'Fine, fine. Let me think... oh, I've got one. It was the only time I ever knew a prank of hers to backfire. And it was also one of the only times that she successfully roped me in, so I got in trouble too. We did everything together, but when she wanted to play tricks, I tried to stay out of it. But this time she convinced me.

'Our parents were pretty used to it, and they didn't mind so long as nobody got hurt. So, we were bored one day – I think we were on school vacation at the time – and our parents had gone out for a little while. So Ziranne decided that we should fix the front door to drop something on them when they came back in. But she needed my help – she knew I had the technical skill to rig something that would release whatever it was she wanted to drop when the door's opening command was activated. She kept bothering me and bothering me until I agreed to do it. While I worked on the door, she worked out what she wanted to drop. It was autumn, and our garden was ankle-deep in leaves, so she scraped up a huge pile of them and we set it all up – when our parents got home, they'd step through the door and a pile of leaves would fall on them.

'”We'll clean everything up,” Ziranne said. “That way they won't mind. Stop making such a fuss, Jadzia.”

'So there it was. We sat and waited for our parents to get home. And soon enough, they did. But not alone. They had an extremely important work contact of my mother's with them. And we dumped a gardenful of leaves directly on her head.'

Jadzia put her head in her hands. 'It still makes me blush to think about it today. We got in _so_ much trouble. She was very kind about it, but she had to have her outfit specially cleaned to get rid of all the leaf fragments. Plus she found an insect in her hair. Our parents made Ziranne and I go over and do all of her chores for a month. I'd never been so mortified.'

Kate laughed. 'Jadzia, if that's the worst thing you did in your childhood, I think you're doing fine.'

'Oh, it's not the worst,' laughed Jadzia. 'But it's definitely in the top ten.'

Alyssa smiled. 'It's nice that you and your sister played together like that.'

'You have a sister, don't you, Alyssa?' Kate asked.

She nodded. 'One sister, four brothers.'

'Did you get on?' Nerys asked.

Alyssa made a thoughtful face. 'Not exactly. Not for a long time, anyway.'

* * *

Alyssa and Celeste ought to have been close. That was what everyone said, anyway. They were so near in age, barely a year apart. When they were tiny they had played together all the time, but the older they got, the harder it was for them to find anything in common. Alyssa wanted to keep the pastel blues and greens of their room, Celeste wanted to paint everything purple. They drew a line down the middle of the room, dividing it. Celeste had the purple half, and later the black half, the half plastered with pictures of her favourite snowboarders.

Alyssa didn't want to go to camp, she wanted to stay home with their parents. Celeste couldn't wait to get away. So Celeste went, and Alyssa stayed, and spent the whole summer missing her sister but not really understanding the reason for the bad mood that kept sweeping over her at unhelpful moments.

Celeste didn't write – of course she didn't. She didn't even send video messages. Alyssa sent a few, but she stopped bothering when Celeste didn't reply.

'Why didn't you send me any more messages?' Celeste asked reproachfully when she got back, her arms full of sports trophies and her hair full of colourful clips.

Alyssa didn't answer, just threw up her hands and huffed and went to sit on her bed and read.

Celeste was away more and more – she was snowboarding competitively now, and she was one of the best in her age range. She was practising most weekends she wasn't competing. Alyssa enjoyed having the whole room to herself while Celeste was away all day, and their brothers, all a few years younger, were out playing with friends. It was peaceful. No fighting about who got to play their music.

Their parents tried – they took the two of them on outings without the younger ones, they sent them on errands together – but there was nothing to be done. It wasn't even that they disliked each other, really. They just didn't have that much in common any more. Perhaps all they'd ever shared was an age and a bedroom.

Celeste went away to be a professional snowboarder full time. Alyssa joined Starfleet. They heard about one another from their parents, sent birthday wishes and congratulations on big news, but they didn't talk for a long time. It didn't seem like there was much to say.

When the Enterprise D was destroyed, Alyssa put in her request to be assigned to the Enterprise E, then took a leave of absence to wait for them to build it. She couldn't bear the idea of a temporary assignment. Andrew took one – he couldn't stand waiting around. Alyssa took the baby and went to stay with her parents for a while.

Celeste was staying there too, recovering from a serious snowboarding accident, one that had almost cost her life. Alyssa had heard about it at the time, called her parents, frantic, and in the weeks since she'd sent Celeste messages, and Celeste had even replied once or twice. When she arrived at the house, baby in one arm, bag in the other, exhausted from the trip back from the Veridian system, Celeste limped down the front path to hug her, and it felt... fine. Natural. They talked easily about their siblings and their parents and what was in the news, until at last, late that evening, they were the only two left up.

'So,' said Celeste, 'they're building another Enterprise?'

Alyssa nodded. 'It won't be the same, but I'd like to stay anyway. Doctor Crusher said she'd ask for me, and I think they'll give her whatever team she wants.'

There was silence for a few moments, companionable, not awkward.

'When I came down that mountain,' Celeste said at last, 'I didn't... I didn't even wonder if that was it. I've had so many accidents and I've never been so seriously hurt. I just... I don't know, I saw the mountain spinning past me and I just thought, I've done this before, I know how this works, they'll take me to the hospital and by evening I'll be at a bar telling the story.'

Alyssa nodded. 'On the Enterprise, I felt almost invincible. We'd come through so much, and somehow we'd always gotten out of it. I felt so safe there. Even when we were headed straight for the surface of the planet, half of me still thought something would turn up. I don't know how I'm going to feel, when I ship out on the new Enterprise.'

'You'll be okay,' said Celeste.

'We both will,' said Alyssa.

* * *

They wrote sometimes, after Alyssa went back. She still wrote much more often than Celeste, but Celeste sent gifts and video messages for the baby, and when she did write it was with a casual friendliness that Alyssa hadn't felt since they were small. Perhaps that conversation had brought them together, or perhaps it would have happened anyway with them staying in the same house, older, wiser, less conscious of all the ways they were opposites. It was nice, whatever it was.

* * *

'My relationship with my brother Asher was a little like that,' said Kasidy. 'We were pretty near in age but we never really got to be friends until we were both adults. My littlest brother Noah, though – the two of us were close right from the start.'

'He's a lot younger, right?' Nerys asked.

Kasidy nodded. 'Thirteen years. By the time we were old enough to really spend time together, I was headed off-planet, but somehow we stayed in touch. I took care of him a lot when he was a baby, and when I was working sub-orbital freight I used to come home weekends and we'd play ball together.'

'Baseball?' Jadzia asked.

Kasidy shook her head. 'Not exactly, that was before baseball got big again there. But we had a game we'd made up ourselves that was a simpler version, and I taught him to play that. We used to spend hours out in the yard hitting balls back and forth, running up and down between the fences.

'When I went off-planet, he was six. He cried and cried and begged me not to go. I almost didn't. It broke my heart to leave him. But we sent each other messages, and I visited whenever I could, and one way or another we made it work. If I was in range I used to read him bedtime stories over subspace.

'I was so excited when I heard that he was getting a baseball league started on Cestus III. Every time I watch a recording of one of his games, I think of how I was the one who taught him to throw and catch, how to hold a bat, and now here he is, bringing baseball back to a whole colony.'

She shook her head, laughed. 'Honestly I still find it surprising that he's old enough to be doing something like that. Some part of me is always going to think of him as that little kid, running as fast as his little legs will take him.'

'That's a sweet story,' Nerys smiled. 'I'd love to meet him if he ever comes to the station.'

'I'll get him here someday,' Kasidy promised. 'He's always saying he'll visit. What we really need is a DS9 baseball team – that'd get his attention.'

After a moment's quiet, Keiko said, 'You know, Kasidy, your story made me think of Molly. I was thinking about how nice it is to have an interest you can really share with someone. Now that she's a little older, I'm really enjoying seeing her personality develop, figuring out what we have in common.

'Nerys,' she said. 'Actually it was partly down to you. I don't think I told you about this yet?'

Nerys shook her head, interested.

'Do you remember,' said Keiko, 'when you had those tickets to the Bajoran Fashion Fair, and you couldn't make it, so I took Molly?'

'Sure I do,' said Nerys. 'You said she had a good time?'

'We both did,' said Keiko. 'But I didn't realise until afterward how much of an impression it had made on her. I've always been interested in fashion. My family's artistic, my grandmother especially, but I never seemed to have the knack for it. I guess I could have gotten good if I'd really wanted to, but I was never that interested as a child, and later I already knew that I wanted to be a botanist. But fashion... I couldn't draw or paint or sculpt, but I could see what colours and textures complemented each other and which ones clashed. I was good at putting together outfits.

'So I took Molly to the fair, and we took our time, looked at everything. She asked a lot of questions, and I explained to her about how the fashion community was one of the first artistic groups on Bajor to really start recovering after the Occupation, and she was interested, but she was more interested in the colours, the styles, and she begged me to get her one of the crocheted scarves they were selling.

'So I bought it, we took it home, and I sort of thought that would be the end of it. But the next day she asked me to find her something to read about the history of fashion on Bajor, and then I found her a book about Japanese fashion on Earth, and since then she hasn't stopped. She doesn't even need my help any more, but she tells me everything she's finding out. We look at the latest collections together, and we pick our favourites. She likes Bajoran fashion, and Betazoid fashion, and Vulcan fashion. She thinks Earth fashion is boring. And she's started to critique my outfits.

'She's blunt about it – you all know what she's like – the other day she saw me getting ready and she just looked at me in sort of a pitying way, and said, “Mommy, are you _sure_ about that jacket?” I don't know how I got out of there without laughing.

'She's always had her own ideas about things, but this is the first time we've really been able to share something this way, something that we can talk about like equals. She's learned so much, I can hardly keep up with her. And she draws, too, her own outfits. Soon I'll teach her to program the clothing replicator, and there'll be no stopping her.'

This time it was Deanna and Beverly's turn to go downstairs and fetch more drinks and snacks. The others watched them, shouting encouragement, as they made their way down the spiral staircase and hopped over the bar.

'What about you, Kate?' Guinan asked, when they had returned. 'You must have some interesting family members?'

'You're right, I do,' said Kate. 'Plenty of them, in fact. Maybe I'll tell you about my sister...'

'I didn't know you had a sister!' Beverly said.

'She's not my biological sister,' Kate said. 'But she's legally my sister under Klingon law.'

Jadzia tilted her head. 'You performed the R'uustai?'

'Proud daughter of the House of Torin,' Kate grinned.

* * *

She was three years out of medical school, and already regretting the decision to focus on research instead of working with patients. (It would be another couple of decades of switching between the two before she realised that she just couldn't stick to one over the other and she was destined for a life of flip-flopping.) She'd quit her research role and applied for a job in a hospital on Earth, but her mentor from medical school, a grandmotherly woman with a surprising devilish streak, had suggested she join a ship that was on a deep space mission to provide medical assistance to some colonies near the Klingon border. It had sounded different, so she'd agreed.

It was a joint effort, an attempt to foster greater cooperation between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. The ship's doctors were from both Klingon and Federation worlds, and they worked, rested and played together.

Kate transported over from the Starfleet ship that had carried her and a handful of other new recruits, most of them older and more experienced than she was. She'd already learned a lot from them on the journey, but she was ready for them to stop treating her like some kid – she was qualified, after all, and she knew her stuff. She followed the personnel officer to her new quarters, her bag slung over her shoulder, her head held high. The door slid aside and revealed a space narrower than Kate's bathroom at the academy, containing two single beds with a slice of floor between them.

'Well,' said the officer, 'this is it! That's your bed, that's your cubby, that's the bathroom, and this is your roommate, Dr B'Ekara of the House of Torin. B'Ekara, this is Dr Pulaski.'

'Call me Kate,' said Kate.

The young Klingon woman reading on the other bed got up and shook Kate firmly by the hand.

'Welcome!' she boomed. 'I'd been hoping you would arrive soon. All this space to myself, it's excessively luxurious!'

Kate tilted her head at the cramped quarters. 'Yes,' she agreed. 'Myself, I prefer to sleep in a damp cupboard on a bed of straw, but this'll have to do, I guess.'

B'Ekara laughed and slapped Kate on the back.

'I can see you two are going to get along fine,' said the personnel officer, and left.

'Ever met a Klingon before?' B'Ekara asked.

Kate shook her head. 'Seen a few, but never to talk to.'

'Well, you'll soon find that we're not quite what you've seen in the holos,' B'Ekara grinned. 'Especially not on this ship. Doctors – not exactly the Klingon stereotype.'

'I guess not,' said Kate. 'I'd never really thought about Klingon doctors until I got this job.'

'Neither had most of your colleagues,' said B'Ekara. 'But you'll find us competent enough. Now – have you ever had bloodwine?'

Kate hadn't, but by the end of the evening she'd tasted it going down and coming back up again. B'Ekara laughed, but she still held Kate's hair away from her face while she threw up, and when Kate woke in the middle of the night, bleary and parched, she found a glass of water on the shelf beside her.

In the morning B'Ekara gleefully informed her that hangover cures were an important element of Klingon medicine, and made her drink something that looked like it had eyeballs in it.

It did not help.

* * *

Kate got along famously with the Klingons, but B'Ekara especially. She wouldn't eat the Klingon food, but she wasn't squeamish about sharing a table with it, and she didn't mind that dinner was often accompanied by loud singing and occasional challenges and fights. It was good first aid practice, and entertaining besides.

B'Ekara took her under her wing and they worked together on their rounds of the colony worlds. It was the first time Kate had seen new colonies, ones without infrastructure and the clean efficiency of the central Federation planets. The cases they worked on ranged from vaccinations and dietary advice to tending injuries, stopping disease outbreaks before they could get started, delivering babies, and occasional emergency care. Their rounds took them to eight planets – five Federation colonies and three Klingon – and took several weeks. When they were between worlds, they prepared for the next one – they were never short of work. Sometimes those who had been ill came and stayed on the ship for a round to recover under the doctors' care, and there were often children of half a dozen species running up and down the cramped corridors.

It was a steep learning curve for Kate, and she loved every minute of it.

She'd been on the ship for seven months when they got trapped.

They were down on one of the Federation colonies, a new one where the initial group of colonists – a few dozen scientists and support personnel – were still conducting viability tests. Kate, B'Ekara and a handful of colleagues had beamed down to give everyone a physical.

The seismic activity began without warning, a tremor that slid the ground back and forth beneath them. B'Ekara grabbed Kate's hand for balance. Equipment fell to the floor with a clatter, but after a moment the ground stopped shaking.

Kate's heartbeat throbbed in her skull, but she wasn't hurt, nobody was, just a scare.

The next earthquake was the one that buried them. Six of them – Kate, B'Ekara, their colleagues T'Mina and Gary, and two colonists, Stephanie and Kota – trapped inside the prefab shelter they'd been using as a makeshift infirmary, rocks heaped above them.

'They'll be able to beam us out, I'm sure,' said Gary, opening his communicator.

No response. Perhaps a shiny Starfleet ship could have rescued them instantly, but the medical ship was years out of date and hadn't been top-of-the-range to begin with.

'So we've lost touch with them. They'll come for us,' said Kate, with confidence she didn't feel. 'We just have to wait. Anyone got a pack of cards?'

T'Mina did. They played. After a couple of hours had gone by, Stephanie suddenly began to dematerialise. It took a long time – she faded in and out for several seconds, and at one point it almost looked like she wouldn't dematerialise at all, but eventually she was gone. It was somehow unsettling.

'I guess they can only beam up one of us at a time,' said Gary.

'Makes sense,' said Kate.

Over the next few hours, first Kota, then T'Mina disappeared, as slowly as Stephanie had done.

'They'll get to all of us,' B'Ekara said cheerily. 'It doesn't feel very Klingon, just sitting around waiting to be rescued, but it's better than trying to escape and bringing this whole lot falling down on us. Perhaps you Terrans are right that patience is a virtue.'

Gary was next. But his dematerialisation didn't go the same as the others. He started to fade out, just like they had, and then he rematerialised completely. A couple of minutes passed.

'Are they starting to have trouble?' Kate asked.

'I'm sure it's fine,' Gary said.

'Have courage,' said B'Ekara, clasping her shoulder. 'If we die we die honourably, on a mission to serve others.'

Gary began to dematerialise again, with agonising slowness, so slow that it made Kate wince. After an age he winked almost out of existence, and then a moment later he was back.

He fell to the ground with a limp thud.

B'Ekara was the first to him. 'He's dead,' she said. 'I think... I don't think all of him came back.'

Kate stared, suddenly dizzy. Gary. He'd played the oboe. He'd had three sisters. He'd once eaten gagh on a dare.

The ground shook again. The roof of the prefab buckled. A ceiling strut snapped loose and swung into B'Ekara, slamming her into the wall.

Kate shrieked and ran to her, opening her medical bag with shaking fingers.

'I'm fine,' said B'Ekara, swiping impatiently at the blood pouring from her head. 'Nothing to worry about.'

'That's right,' said Kate, recovering her briskness. 'You're going to be absolutely fine. You're going to sit here – here, against the wall, careful, good girl – and I'm just going to do a little temporary first aid here, and _then_ , you're going to tell me Klingon stories to keep us both entertained until they rescue us.'

'And to keep my mind off the fact that I have a serious head injury that needs immediate treatment?' B'Ekara teased.

'Well, if you want to look at it that way, sure,' said Kate, frowning at her tricorder.

'I don't think I can tell a story, my head is swimming,' said B'Ekara. 'You tell me one?'

'All right, but I expect you to pay attention,' Kate said. 'For the glory of the Empire.'

Once she had patched up B'Ekara as best as she could with the supplies available, Kate talked about every little thing that came into her head, coaxed responses from B'Ekara, and tried not to watch the buckling ceiling, or think about how Gary had broken up into tiny little pieces and then been put together again wrong. They were going to try to do that to her and B'Ekara – unless they'd already given up on them. She thought she'd rather be crushed by the rubble above them – or more likely run out of air – than go that way. But she didn't say any of that. She chatted and sang and teased and ignored the way the air felt thinner than it had earlier.

B'Ekara's condition was worsening. That was probably why they decided to rescue her first. She dematerialised with awful slowness, and didn't appear again. Kate hoped she'd made it, hoped she hadn't arrived on the other side in pieces.

It was quiet without her. Kate could hear the groaning of the structure under the pressure from above.

She waited. And she waited. Her mind's eye was full of pictures. Would it hurt? Would she feel anything at all? Would she know it was happening? Would the pieces of her be left here with Gary, still lying there in the opposite corner, dusty from the last tremor?

When she felt herself begin to dematerialise, she didn't even have time to choke back a sob – it came out when she materialised, an age later, on the transporter pad on the ship. She collapsed to her knees, gulping for air.

'Well done, well done, it's all right, it's all right now,' said B'Ekara, and then she was there, her arms around Kate, holding her close.

'You're alive,' gasped Kate.

'And well, thanks to you, _chaj_ ,' B'Ekara said. 'You saved my life.'

Kate shrugged. 'It was nothing.'

It felt like it, anyway, right now.

* * *

'I want you to perform the R'uustai with me,' B'Ekara announced, the night after Gary's memorial.

'The what now?' Kate asked.

'The R'uustai. It's a bonding ceremony. It would unite us as sisters in the eyes of Klingon law... and in our hearts.'

'I...'

'If you do not wish to participate, it will not affect our friendship,' B'Ekara said.

'B'Ekara, I'd be honoured,' Kate said. 'I... nobody has ever done anything like this for me.'

'You saved my life,' said B'Ekara. 'And you showed courage. And you _are_ my sister, in all but name.'

Kate launched across the narrow space between their beds. Klingons gave the best hugs, it turned out.

* * *

'So... we performed the R'uustai,' Kate said. 'And that's how I became a Klingon's sister.' She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand.

'Do you still see her?' Leeta asked.

'Not for a little while, with the war,' said Kate. 'I miss her. But we keep in touch. We're sisters.'


	5. Chapter 5

Beverly sighed. 'This war is keeping so many families apart. I've barely spoken to Wesley in months.'

Keiko nodded. 'It's been awful, having to take the children back to Earth, away from Miles, whenever things get too hot.'

There was a sob. The table looked up as one to see Deanna drying her eyes with her sleeve.

'Oh, Deanna, I didn't even think!' Kate said, leaning close to put an arm around her.

'Deanna hasn't heard from Lwaxana since the Dominion occupied Betazed a few weeks ago,' Beverly explained to the table at large.

'I'm sure she'll be all right,' Leeta soothed.

'I hope so,' said Deanna, 'but she won't lie low, I know she won't. Her position makes her enough of a target as it is, and I know she'll fight back any way she can. And I miss her. She usually sends me a message at least every couple of days. I don't know where she is, if she's safe, whether my little brother is all right... I feel further from her right now than I have in my whole life, and there's nothing I can do about it.'

'Your mother's a resourceful woman, she can handle herself,' Nerys said firmly. 'We've seen it.'

'Like that time with the paintings, when...' Jadzia began, then trailed off with a stricken look at Nerys.

'That's right,' said Nerys, with half a smile. 'That time with Ziyal's paintings. Do you want to hear about it, Deanna?'

Deanna nodded. 'Go on.'

Nerys took a deep breath. 'It was right after your mother married Odo, while she was staying on the station, waiting for a transport back to Betazed,' she said.

'What's it like having Odo for a stepfather, Deanna?' Jadzia teased.

'Questions later. Story first,' said Nerys firmly.

* * *

Nerys and Ziyal were in the habit of getting breakfast together on the Promenade and sitting near one of the viewports to watch the stars, and the wormhole when it opened. Nerys liked to have a chance to check on Ziyal at least once every day, and their shared breakfasts helped it not seem too obvious. Ziyal was smart and independent, but she was young, and it was only a few months ago that she'd been living in a Breen prison camp.

Nerys worried a little that she hadn't really made many friends on the station yet. That was why she'd recommended the painting classes – that, and Captain Sisko had suggested that a creative outlet might be good for Ziyal as she recovered from years of trauma.

The class was only once a week, though – the instructor came back and forth from Bajor for it – and apart from that, Ziyal was mostly at a loose end. Nerys worried about how she was filling the empty hours. Ziyal did seem to want to make friends – she responded well when she and Jake Sisko were thrown together – but when Nerys wasn't there she mostly stayed in her quarters, too anxious to move around the station by herself.

That morning they were heading for the Replimat when a voice soared over the noise of the crowds.

'Major Kira! Join me for breakfast?'

Ambassador Troi had naturally secured the most coveted table in the Replimat, and she was halfway through a pile of pastries. She waved the two of them over.

'Plenty to share!' she said. 'But who's this?' She beamed at Ziyal, who had moved a little behind Nerys.

'This is Tora Ziyal,' Nerys said. 'My... ward. Ziyal, this is...'

'Lwaxana Troi, daughter of the Fifth House of Betazed,' Lwaxana said. 'But you may call me Lwaxana. Well sit, sit down, help yourselves!'

Nerys slid into a seat and took a pastry, and after a hesitant moment Ziyal followed.

'Did you manage to book transport back home?' Nerys asked.

'There's a ship leaving tomorrow afternoon,' said Lwaxana. 'The captain is anxious about the possibility of my going into labour mid-voyage, but I'm hoping I can persuade him to see reason. In the meantime, I'm a little restless. I spent all that time hiding in my quarters, worrying about Jeyal... I've barely seen anything of the station this trip! I was hoping to spend the day looking at the new shops on the Promenade, but I get a little bored on my own.' She turned to Ziyal. 'I don't suppose you'd have a few hours to spare to keep me company? I'd appreciate it very much.'

Ziyal blinked.

'You don't have to if you don't want to, Ziyal,' said Nerys. No point being subtle around a Betazoid, especially not this one. She would understand.

'That's okay,' Ziyal said. 'I'd like that.' She smiled at Nerys reassuringly.

'All right then, if that's settled I should get to Ops,' said Nerys, picking up a pastry and wrapping it in a napkin to eat on the way. 'Let me know if there's anything you need, Ambassador.'

She gave Ziyal a quick hug and left them to it, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder to see how they were getting on in her absence.

* * *

Nerys heard later on that they'd had a wonderful morning – Ziyal shared all the details of their shopping trip and their visit to the shrine and their various fast food adventures with a kind of gleeful awe – but that was only afterwards.

After a morning full of meetings (when had her life become so relentlessly dominated by meetings?), Nerys asked the computer to locate Ziyal and Ambassador Troi, discovered they were in one of the recreation rooms, and went to see how they were getting along.

That was where she found Lwaxana toe to toe – or as close as she could get in her current condition – with a Bajoran man she vaguely recognised as Ziyal's art teacher, glaring up at him with a ferociousness that Nerys had, perhaps naively, never expected from a Betazoid. Ziyal was hovering anxiously behind her.

'What's going on?' Nerys asked.

'This... _individual_ ,' Lwaxana said, 'thought he could get away with exploiting the talents of an innocent young woman...'

'It's all legal!' he protested. 'It was in the forms she signed when she joined the class...'

' _What_ was?' Nerys asked, folding her arms.

'This... embarrassment to the fine profession of teaching _tricked_ Ziyal into signing away her rights to her own work!' Lwaxana snapped. 'And is now attempting to profit from it like some low-down dirty Ferengi! He's already sold one of her paintings after he told her it wasn't any good! We only found out because Ziyal came here to show me some of her work that was on display, and the lousy skunk happened to be thinking too loud about how much money he's making!'

The man paused for a moment, as if torn between penitence and defiance, and opted for the latter.

'She should read things more carefully!' he scowled. 'Not my fault she's stupid enough to sign things without caring what she's agreeing to.'

Nerys opened her mouth, but Lwaxana was ahead of her.

'It may be technically legal, but it's still wrong, and mark my words, the Betazoid government will have something to say to the Bajoran government about it!'

He shrugged. 'Yeah, it'll go on the list right after reparations from the _Cardassians_.' He glared at Ziyal.

Nerys's fists were already rising when Lwaxana grabbed the art teacher by the collar, pulled him downward so that his nose was practically touching hers, and opened her eyes wide.

'Do you really want to get on my bad side?' she asked. 'Do you want to get on the bad side of all my friends, everywhere in the quadrant? Because that's what you're asking for. Cross me, and you'll never work on this station again, and that's just for starters. No member of Starfleet, from the admiralty down, will ever work with you, and you'll never be allowed to visit any Starfleet facility. I'll have you banned from a dozen Federation worlds, and my diplomatic contacts on Bajor will make sure that no art school there will let you teach.'

He sagged.

'And on top of that,' said Lwaxana, 'I'm _this_ close to poking you in the eye right now, and don't think I won't. You're going to give Ziyal all of her paintings back, including the one you sold, and then you're going to leave this station and never come back, do you understand me?'

* * *

After he had left, Lwaxana sat heavily down in the nearest chair, fanning herself. 'I'm glad that young man came to his senses,' she said. 'I always say, there's no problem that can't be solved with a diplomatic approach...'

Ziyal giggled.

'You know,' said Lwaxana, leafing through the small portfolio Ziyal had built up from her lessons, 'your art really is promising. Have you thought about pursuing it further? Something more than one lesson a week?'

'I... it hadn't occurred to me,' said Ziyal. 'Do you really think I could be any good?'

'My dear, you already are good,' said Lwaxana. 'You obviously have a natural talent. With the right training, I think you could be exceptional. In fact... would you mind if I bought one of these? Someday I think I'll love telling people Tora Ziyal sold her first painting to me.'

* * *

'You know,' said Deanna, 'I think she told me about that at the time. I know the painting, it's hanging in her favourite sitting room. Or it was, last time I was there...'

'Maybe it'll be there the next time you visit,' said Nerys, and she reached over the table to squeeze Deanna's hand.

'I heard about what happened to Ziyal, I'm sorry,' Deanna said. 'You must miss her very much.'

Nerys nodded. 'It's comforting, though, knowing that there are people who will remember her. I thought talking about it would hurt more, but it's... it's not bad.'

Deanna nodded. 'I know what you mean. I should know better, but when my friend Tasha died, it was hard for me to talk about her for a really long time. It's good to remember her now, though.'

'What was she like?' asked Alyssa. 'I heard her name so often, but I only joined the ship after she left.'

'Ah, Tasha,' said Deanna. 'She was... she was so full of love, not just for people but for everything – she wanted to do and see everything. Every time she had shore leave, she'd wear herself out trying to explore an entire planet in forty-eight hours.

'Once we were on a scientific mission in the Laris System, and Tasha and I had some time off. She persuaded me to join her on Laris III, where the oceans are particularly beautiful. Tasha never saw the sea until she was almost an adult, and she always loved it. On this particular occasion, she booked the both of us a surfing lesson – neither of us had done it before, but Tasha was convinced that her superior balance and dexterity from her security training would be more than sufficient to have her surfing proficiently by the end of the lesson.

'Obviously that didn't happen. We enjoyed it a lot anyway, even though we spent most of the session falling off our surfboards and spitting out sea water. Tasha was determined to master surfing by the end of our shore leave, so she booked us another lesson for that evening, and another three for the next day.

'Anyway, after that we had a little time, so we decided to go free-diving to look at all the beautiful sea life we'd heard about, but once we got down there it wasn't exactly like we'd expected. A lot of the plants and fish looked damaged or diseased, and there were empty places where it looked like plants had died and no new ones had grown in their places.

'Once we got out, we quietly asked around about it – the quietly part was my idea, not Tasha's – and we found out that the increased popularity of surfing and diving in the area was having a negative impact on the local sea life. A few species were already endangered, but the leaders of the planet were deliberately keeping it quiet because they were gunning for Federation membership, and so many Federation ships were going there specifically to enjoy marine sports.

Naturally we decided to report it to Captain Picard as soon as we got back to the ship, but Tasha thought that wasn't enough. So she managed to track down a few local environmental leaders and get some hard information from them about exactly what was going on – which species were affected, how long this had been happening, everything. They were scared to talk to her, because they knew how much trouble they'd be in for exposing the secret, so she decided to expose it herself. She took the information they gave her and – once she had the captain's permission – she put together an information pack and sent it out so several prominent Federation leaders, as well as to all her friends, asking them to avoid vacationing on Laris III until they had established better ways to protect their wildlife. Then she cancelled all our surfing lessons and spent the rest of our stay indoors, researching ways that the surfing and diving companies could stay in operation without harming the sea life any more. Then she sent _that_ information pack out to all of the companies operating in the area.

'Then we went for drinks, at a bar overlooking the sea.

'”I hope they figure it out,” she said. “I'd love to be able to surf here again someday.”

'”Well,” I said, “you've helped them make a start, at least. I'm sorry our weekend didn't work out quite how you planned.”

'”I'm not,” said Tasha.

'After that she decided to see if she could find a surfing program for the holodeck. She managed to find one, and she had it on order, but it didn't arrive until after she'd already died. I used it a few times, afterwards.

'Anyway... Laris III now has one of the best track records in the whole Federation for marine wildlife protection. I think Tasha would have been proud of that.'

'That's wonderful,' said Keiko.

Deanna tilted her head. 'Tasha was pretty wonderful.'

For a moment they sat in thoughtful silence.

'I have a story I'd like to tell, about Jack,' Beverly said. 'It happened when Wesley was small. The three of us went on a camping trip together near Balfour Lake, on Caldos. It was getting towards evening, and Jack went to find some more firewood. Well, after a while I heard this yelp, and I called his name but he didn't reply, so I grabbed Wesley and ran to see what was wrong.

'Turned out Jack had gone further afield than normal and fallen in a mud pool by the lake. By the time I got there, he had already climbed out most of the way, but he was absolutely covered in mud. Wesley thought it was hysterical. Insisted on being allowed to get muddy too. So Jack picked him up and hugged him until they were both covered in the stuff.

'I thought maybe I could get away with it, but Jack scooped a big handful of mud and threw it right at me, so what could I do but get over there and throw some back? In the end there was nothing for it but to take everything off and get clean in the lake, then dry ourselves by the fire. Wesley fell asleep, we put him to bed, and Jack and I just sat there together, getting warm, watching the sun set.

'It was one of those days that feels like a memory while it's still happening. If I close my eyes I can still see it now.'

She sighed and looked down into her glass, swirling the liquid around.

'There's someone I'd like to remember,' Leeta said softly. 'I don't know if she's alive or dead, but can I tell you all about her?'

'Of course!' said Kasidy.

'Go ahead,' Guinan echoed.

'Well,' said Leeta, 'her name was Valah. I knew her a few years after I worked with Nessa. The cafe shut down when the Cardassians discovered some minerals under the town that they wanted to mine... well, I guess the whole town shut down, really. We all had to move. I was sent to work in a hotel for Cardassian dignitaries visiting from Cardassia Prime, up in Relliketh Province.

'That was where we met. She arrived the same time I did, we were new girls together. She was from Dahkur, like you, Nerys. She'd been allowed to work on her uncle's farm for years, but the farm ran out of money and she had to strike out on her own.

'She hated it there. We shared a room, and at first she cried every night. I used to tell her jokes to make her laugh. She got used to it in the end, she was strong. We both of us cleaned the rooms during the day and worked in the bar in the evenings. The tidying wasn't so bad, but the bar work was horrible. The visiting Cardassians had always _heard things_ about Bajoran girls and thought they could.... Well, it wasn't exactly a pleasant environment. But we worked the same shift, and when we finally got off, at the end of the night, we'd go back to our little room and lock the door and just be ourselves for a while.

'We didn't have much but we made the most of what we had. One of her jobs was to refresh the floral arrangements for the guests – the place had a huge hothouse for them. Can you imagine? Not enough land to feed all the Bajorans, if you asked the Cardassians, but they could spare hecapates to grow flowers for themselves? Anyway, Valah was supposed to throw the ones in the rooms away when they showed the slightest sign of wilting, but she always brought them back to our quarters to brighten up the place. And a few times I managed to sneak stained tablecloths and throws when I was supposed to be putting them back in the replicator, so in the end we got our room looking pretty nice.

'Now and then we even got a day off. We weren't allowed to go far, but there were some pretty woods nearby and we and some of the other girls used to take a picnic when we could get one and just sit and talk, where we could say what we really thought without worrying about any Cardassians not liking it.

'I miss all of those girls, but I miss her the most. She got reassigned, I never found out where. She was just gone one day. Neither of us had a family name so it wasn't like we could find each other easily, even once the Occupation was over. She might still be out there somewhere. Part of me thinks I'll bump into her again someday.'

'Maybe you will,' said Guinan, and there was something in her tone that made Leeta look at her curiously.

'I feel the same way about Ro Laren,' Guinan continued. 'I just have this feeling that someday I'll be tending bar and she'll slouch in and order her usual like she's been there all the time.'

'Ro Laren – that's a Bajoran name,' said Leeta.

Guinan nodded. 'She served on the Enterprise for a while before she left us to join the Maquis.'

Kasidy hissed a sad breath. 'You think she made it out?' she asked.

'I never saw her name on any of the lists of the dead,' said Guinan. 'But then, those lists were patchy at best. I don't know. I just... have a feeling. As soon as she arrived on the Enterprise, I knew she was somebody I wanted to get to know. She was so spiky, so... un-Starfleet. No offense.' She grinned around the table.

'She came into Ten Forward with a face stonier than Worf's. Took weeks before she'd even crack a smile. The first time I ever saw her laugh was a couple of months after she arrived on the ship. She'd just gotten back from a planetary away mission under Commander Riker, and she was complaining to me about how he'd refused to let her go off on her own to investigate something that looked interesting, I don't remember what now. Anyway, he told her that it was too dangerous for the away team to split up, because something about the magnetic fields of the local rocks made their navigation equipment useless, and there were so many rock formations that all looked the same – he didn't want to risk anyone going off by themselves and getting lost. If they got into trouble, the rest of the team would have no reliable way of finding them.

'So she complained about it, but she followed her orders.' Guinan paused, smoothing away a smile. 'And then, Commander Riker got lost.'

Deanna let out a sudden peal of laughter.

'Laren had to organise the rest of the away team to get him back,' Guinan continued. 'She did it totally by the book, kept the team together, didn't lose anyone else or so much as put a foot wrong. When they found him it turned out he'd fallen down a slippery incline and lost his combadge, in the five seconds his party had been looking the other way.

'She was smiling while she told me the story, but she didn't start laughing until she tried to describe his expression when they showed up. She couldn't stop for two or three minutes. And then he walked into Ten Forward, and it started all over again.'

Deanna grinned. 'I knew there was a reason I missed her.'

'Maybe Guinan's right,' said Beverly. 'Maybe she survived, and someday she'll show up again.'


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the lateness of this chapter, folks! I moved house, and also Britain exploded. /o\

'It still makes me shudder to think of everything that happened with Maquis,' said Kasidy. 'It wasn't long after I got out of prison for helping them... if things had been different, I could have been caught in the crossfire. As it was, I lost a lot of friends.'

Nerys took Kasidy's hand, and Kasidy gave her a grateful smile.

'You know,' she continued, 'I don't know what I would have done. I thought – I still think – that getting food and medical supplies to the Maquis was the right thing to do. I would have kept trying, even after I was released from prison – but by then I was a liability, more trouble to them than I was worth. I'm sure Odo was keeping an eye on me.

'Even after the way Eddington used me, those people didn't deserve what happened to them. When they first approached me I wasn't sure, I had to think about it for a long time.'

'What made you decide to do it?' Alyssa asked.

Kasidy shrugged. 'It was one of the hardest decisions I'd ever made. I didn't want to break the law – I'd never done anything like that before. And I didn't want to hurt Ben, or anyone. And I knew that the treaty with the Cardassians was important. But I kept imagining what I would have done if Cestus III had been handed over to the Cardassians with so little ceremony, so little understanding of what was being given up.

'The thing is... I don't think someone from one of the central Federation worlds can really understand what life is like on these new colonies – how scarce resources are, how hard you have to work for everything, how every single person in the colony has to give everything they can to making a community – not just replicating enough food and shelter for everyone, but making a home, making somewhere that your children will want to live when they get older, not just fly away to somewhere better the moment they can...' She tilted her head, twisted her mouth, acknowledging her own hypocrisy.

'The Federation Council boasts about how many colonies they have on the outskirts of the Federation, but they're all sitting on Earth or Vulcan or Andor with their public holosuites on every corner and replicators in every room. They want successful colonies – they want colonists who'll work and work to make a new planet habitable and safe, even when they could be living in luxury on Earth, even though mistakes happen, like Tarsus IV, like Turkana IV, like Arvada III,' she nodded at Beverly, 'even though it'll be generations before their work really comes to fruition.

'Have you seen the recruitment posters for colonists on Earth? The happy smiling children in sunny fields? On Cestus III a weather control net was always coming to the top of the priority list, and it never quite got there. Rain every other day for most of the year. And the colony had been established fifteen years by the time I was born. It's a hard life. People who choose it have to really want it.

'And then, for the Federation to turn around and order all those colonists to abandon the homes they'd spent years building? I... I don't know what I'd have done in that situation, but I could understand why the Maquis were fighting. And they were so alone. There were children on those colonies. There were families in the Maquis.

'I don't think helping to feed and clothe people and keep them healthy is political. I just don't. I'm still not sure whether I'd have joined the Maquis if something like that had happened to Cestus III, but I'm damn sure I'd still have deserved to eat. I just... oh... listen to me, I've been talking forever, I'm sorry...'

'That's all right,' said Leeta. 'It was important.'

'I know I would have joined the Maquis,' Guinan put in. 'If something like that had happened to my world, if it was just some treaty saying I couldn't be there – I would have stayed and fought.'

* * *

She'd thought, at first, that they would survive. They'd heard rumours about the Borg – they'd been listening to the stories for years – but Guinan had been so sure that they could fight them off, or at least lie low enough to wait until the storm passed and rebuild.

That certainty faded the moment she saw her first Borg drone. Her first three, in fact, walking in their impassive way down the central avenue of the city where she'd grown up, the city she'd always come back to, even after years of travelling.

There were people running away, but Guinan couldn't move. She stood still, watching them. They didn't move any faster to chase the runners. They just kept coming. When they got closer to her, she opened her mouth.

'You don't need to do this,' she said, projecting so that her voice would reach them clearly. 'You need resources, right? We can share our resources with you. Just tell us what you need.'

'We are the Borg,' they said. 'Resistance is futile. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.'

'But that's not necessary!' Guinan protested. 'Please, just stop for a minute. Let us talk to you.'

'We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. Your biological and...'

Guinan shook her head. Closer now, the eyes of the drones looked empty. The stories she'd heard hadn't prepared her. They'd understood the basics of how the Borg worked, but she hadn't been able to truly imagine how it would be – how they were like machines made of hollowed-out people. They weren't just mind-controlled, they weren't just enslaved. They were monstrous.

Guinan turned and ran, the flat voices of the drones following her.

* * *

She still tried.

First they fought. They gathered all the weapons they had – it wasn't many, the El-Aurians were a peaceful people, but they thought it might make a difference.

It didn't make a difference. The Borg just shrugged off their weapons fire and kept coming.

They ran, but the Borg cut them off. Guinan watched Borg drones assimilate five of her friends. They were too far away for her to help, and she couldn't do anything but duck through the throng and run to a side street, where she hid, crying silently.

She walked almost aimlessly, changing course whenever she heard a sound that might be more drones. She wasn't sure where she was any more. Landmarks had been destroyed – buildings scooped up wholesale for their metals.

She stumbled across a child, crying. She shuffled closer. A little girl, she thought.

'Are you all right?' she asked.

Stupid question.

The girl turned her face towards Guinan. It was grey and blotchy – the first stage of assimilation. Guinan recoiled.

'They put something in my neck,' the girl whispered. 'It hurt. I don't know where my brother went.'

Guinan didn't know how long it took for someone to be fully assimilated. Maybe it was reversible. Even if it wasn't, she couldn't leave a child alone out here.

'Come with me,' she said. 'We'll find your brother.'

The girl struggled to her feet and took Guinan's hand.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Guinan was alone again, and there was one more Borg drone in the city. There were marks on Guinan's wrist where the girl's fingers had dug into her as she tried, uncertainly, to extend her assimilation tubules. It was only her smallness and her wobbliness from the assimilation that had saved Guinan from the same fate.

She ran.

* * *

In spite of everything, they kept trying, hiding out in basements, small groups of survivors. If they could just hold on long enough – perhaps somebody would come, perhaps the Borg would stop, perhaps there would still be something left for them after they had taken what they wanted from the beautiful city.

They built some kind of facility, where the public square had been. It looked like their ships – a dark, hideous block. From there, they spiralled outwards, until the city started to look like the inside of a Borg ship. The school Guinan had attended centuries ago, and which her children had attended after her, was razed to the ground. The art gallery she and her third husband had loved was a place for drones to regenerate. A power source took up the entire music shop quarter.

When she finally left, on one of the last handful of spaceworthy ships still on the planet, she didn't even look out of the window as they launched. She just gripped the sides of her seat and closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears as well so that she wouldn't have to hear the others crying.

* * *

Guinan stopped, laying her hands flat on the table. She took a few deep breaths.

'You know, I didn't mean to talk about this,' she said. 'Let's change the subject. Who has a less depressing story?'

Kate raised her hand. 'I'll volunteer. I was thinking about what you were both saying about difficult decisions... and I was looking back on some decisions I've made that have had an effect on how my life turned out. For instance, did you know that I didn't enter Starfleet until I was almost forty?'

'I didn't know that!' Alyssa said. 'What made you join?'

'I'd never really wanted to,' Kate said. 'Or, at least, it hadn't crossed my mind. I'd found enough other interesting opportunities, some on civilian space vessels, some planetside, and to be honest I thought Starfleet would be... I don't know, boring in comparison. I didn't really know any Starfleet officers back then.' She winked. 'I was serving as the medical officer for a civilian cargo company, and we stopped off at a remote outpost run by Starfleet. There was a doctor there, so I dropped by to exchange news – and found that he was dealing with an epidemic of an unknown disease.

'He was a young doctor, barely out of the Medical Academy. He'd been hoping to work his way up to a more exciting posting, poor thing. Anyway, he didn't know what this illness was. He'd sent a message to Starfleet Medical to see if there was anything in their databases that would help, but so far he hadn't heard anything. I said I'd help out in any way I could. The commander of the outpost requested that I stay and help out until the situation was resolved.

'I put in the request with my own commander, but by the time he agreed to let me stay, members of our own crew had already caught the disease. I suggested that the Starfleet doctor impose a quarantine until we could figure out what it was. My captain was pretty unhappy – he had cargo to move, after all – but he trusted me.

'And it was a good thing too. The next day the first victim died. Young Doctor Efin and I worked for days to figure out what the disease was, where it had come from and how we could cure it. We had so few resources, and we lost two more people before we found anything that helped.'

'Did you find a cure, then?' Nerys asked.

Kate nodded. 'Eventually. It was a tough couple of weeks. I was glad to be there. Efin was a promising doctor but I'm not sure he could have managed by himself – there was only one nurse and she caught it in the first week.

'Anyway, when it was all over, the commander of the station thanked me for my help, and told me that Starfleet could use more doctors like me and he'd put a good word in for me if I ever wanted to join. And I thought about it for a while, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was worth trying. And the next month I sent in my application.'

'You know, that was probably around the same time I was thinking of leaving Starfleet,' Beverly said.

'Really?' Guinan asked.

Beverly nodded. 'It was when Wesley was small. Jack had died a few years before, and I'd taken a long parental leave and then a part-time position at a Starfleet training facility in Venezuela. Jack had always said that he wanted Wesley to have a normal childhood – you know, planetside. We'd discussed it when I got pregnant – we'd decided that we would always have a base planetside, and one or the other of us would always be with Wesley there – or at most we wouldn't take him on space assignments for more than a few months at a time.

'It had been more Jack's idea than mine. He'd had an idyllic childhood on Earth and he wanted Wesley to have the same – at the time it seemed reasonable and it wasn't as if I had any firm ideas myself about where to bring up a child. I'd loved my shipboard assignments, loved getting the chance to see the galaxy and encounter new challenges every day, but after Jack died I was glad to be in one place for a while. It wasn't until Wesley was a little older that I started to feel trapped.

'My work at the training facility was pretty routine, and for a while that was helpful – but finally it got boring. I wanted something more, but I didn't know what. None of the other assignments available on Earth looked much better. There seemed to be a lot more going on in civilian medicine. I even started applying for a few things.

'It didn't even occur to me to wonder about putting in for a shipboard assignment. I was so... fixated on making sure that I raised Wesley the way Jack had wanted. I guess I thought that it would be disrespectful to Jack's memory. He'd been so sure that growing up on a spaceship would be a terrible experience. But then, he hadn't done it. He didn't know any better than I did. And we were both so young when Wesley was born.

'It still took me a long time to figure it out. My day-to-day work got more and more unbearable, until I was ready to leave Starfleet altogether, but I kept looking at the lists of assignments available like something would come up that might change my mind, that might make living planetside worthwhile for me. And I never normally even opened the page with the shipboard assignments, but one day... for some reason I just did. I thought I'd just look. And then I thought, what's the harm in applying? I can always change my mind.

'So I applied, and they offered me the assignment, and I took it before I could think better of it. And I'm so glad I did. It's not that I didn't still miss Jack, I still do even now... but I couldn't let his memory dictate the rest of my life. I had to find my own way.'

'I'm glad you did,' said Alyssa, with a warm smile.

'Who wants more spring wine?' Deanna asked, uncorking another bottle and moving around the table to pour it.

'I guess the decision that changed my life the most was reapplying for joining,' Jadzia volunteered, once the glasses had been filled. 'People had tried reapplying before, but nobody had ever been successful.'

'So what made you think you could do it?' Alyssa asked. 'If nobody ever had before?'

Jadzia shrugged. 'I just knew that I wanted to be joined so badly that I would try anything.'

* * *

Her parents hadn't approved.

'You did your best,' her mother said. 'And you made it so far. You're exceptional, and you've proven that, but you didn't make it. Don't let this taint the rest of your life. Don't keep chasing something you can never have, when the whole galaxy is open to you.'

'Look at you!' her father agreed. 'You're a Starfleet officer with premier distinctions in astrophysics, exoarchaeology, exobiology and zoology. You can do anything you want – anything.'

'I _want_ to be joined,' Jadzia said.

'But why?' her mother asked. 'We love you so much just as you are!'

Some families pushed their children to apply for joining, wanting the prestige that came with having a joined relative, but Jadzia's parents had never been that way. They had never understood why she wanted it so badly.

Sometimes even Jadzia didn't understand why she wanted it so much. She'd known for so long that she would be joined someday that it was part of her. She didn't question it any more. Or at least she hadn't, until the Symbiosis Commission had grilled her so hard that she could reel off a dozen impressive-sounding reasons any minute of the day.

And Curzon Dax had said she “lacked purpose”.

It scared her, that he could tell that she wasn't sure why she wanted to be joined. He seemed to have seen through her carefully prepared answers, her cultivated reasons. Not that they weren't true. They were all true. But there was something else there, something she couldn't explain in words. But how could Curzon have known that? It didn't make sense.

Searching for something to hold onto, Jadzia decided that Curzon must have just wanted her to prove how badly she wanted to be joined. Applying again would show him that she was serious. Then they'd have to let her through.

When she reapplied and he didn't block her application, she convinced herself that she must have been right. Spurred on by the fear that this might be her last chance, she threw herself into the process, pushing past her natural shyness to become their perfect candidate, forcing herself onward, doing everything she could.

'Jadzia...' said her sister, one rare night that Jadzia wasn't studying hard at the Symbiosis Commission library. 'Are you sure you're doing this for the right reasons?'

'Of course I am,' Jadzia snapped. 'I know I have a lot to contribute to a joining. I'm intelligent and well educated, I have experience of living on other worlds, I've taken all the...'

'I know all that,' said Ziranne, taking Jadzia's hands. 'But... I just want to make sure that you know... that you're already good enough. Even if you aren't ever joined, you're already good enough. Joining won't make you better. It'll just make you different.'

Jadzia nodded. 'I know.'

'So what is it, then? Why is this so important to you?'

'I... I don't know if I can explain it right. I feel like there's something inside me... a seed, maybe, and it's been waiting all my life to grow. And joining is the only way it can. And I need to see what it grows into.'

'You can grow as a person without joining.'

'I know. But this is what I want. Please, just trust me.'

'Of course I trust you. You're my sister. Nothing will ever change that.'

* * *

'I guess you all know how it ends,' said Jadzia. 'Joining wasn't what I expected – but then, everyone says that. You can't know what it's going to be like without experiencing it.'

'Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you hadn't been joined?' Guinan asked.

'Sure, all the time. Sometimes I even think it might have been better. But I like who I am, and I like my life. I think it was the right decision.'


	7. Chapter 7

'Becoming joined sounds a little like parenting,' said Alyssa. 'You can never truly be prepared for it, it turns your life upside-down, sometimes you almost regret it. You _do_ regret it, even if it's only for a moment. But in the end – for me, anyway – it's worth it.'

'How old is your little one now, Alyssa?' Keiko asked.

Alyssa smiled. 'He's three. He's on Earth right now, staying with Andrew's parents. I miss him, but I'm glad he's not here, in the middle of all this. He sends me video messages, tells me everything he’s been doing. Sometimes they’re the highlight of my day.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Funny… after he was born I couldn’t have imagined that. I couldn’t see my way to a time that we’d be able to communicate so comparatively easily. I… after he was born I had postpartum depression, and he was such a fractious baby. I felt so trapped, so helpless. I’d expected to be overwhelmed with love and instead it was just these constant demands that I didn’t know how to satisfy. I didn’t feel how I was supposed to feel, and it seemed so… shameful. I don’t know what I’d have done without Deanna and Beverly’s help.’

Deanna smiled. ‘You did so much work yourself.’

Alyssa blushed, twirling her glass between her fingers. ‘But you both helped me to see the way. There were days when I was adamant that I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t have it in me to be a parent. I just kept seeing my life stretching ahead of me, full of things that were beyond my capabilities. But I guess I could do it after all. Even if some days it feels like I can’t.’

‘Some days I still feel like that too,’ Keiko put in. ‘It’s funny the things you find yourself capable of, isn’t it? Not just with parenting… I feel like I’ve learned so much here on DS9 about things I can do that I thought I couldn’t.’

‘Me too,’ said Nerys. ‘When I think about the way I was when I first came here… I mean, I only joined the militia because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think it’d last five minutes, and I was so sure they’d have me doing grunt work. I was so young and inexperienced. But then, so was everyone else. I guess someone must have put in a good word, Shakaar maybe. I certainly didn’t expect to be made a major right away. And honestly, until the captain found the celestial temple, I thought I’d drawn the short straw, coming here.

‘I think the first moment I knew that I wanted to stay was when we moved the station, defended the temple from the Cardassians. It was hard not to feel like I was meant to be here, after that. But you know, I think the hardest part of coming here was the paperwork.

‘There wasn’t much time for reading and writing, when I was growing up. I’d learned enough to get by, but suddenly there were reports to write and forms to file and charts to read and crew rotations to plan, and so much of it seemed to be my responsibility. Give me tactics and orders and desperate odds and I can do that – but this scared me in a way that I’d never been scared before. I’d never even known you could be scared when you had a place to stay and something to eat and nobody wanted to shoot at you. I used to lie awake at night dreading the reports I’d have to write the next day.

‘It got so bad that I went to the temple and asked a vedek for advice, although honestly I didn’t have much hope that she could help. I already asked the Prophets every time I prayed to help me find the way through. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.

‘I’d underestimated Vedek Shara, though. She listened to what I said, and she told me to ask the Prophets for guidance, and three days later she asked me to come see her.

‘Turns out Federation computer systems are full of educational tools – but nobody thinks to tell you because they figure anyone likely to be using a Federation computer already knows it all. But she found me a program that would let me dictate my reports and read them back to me for corrections, and another that took me step-by-step through preparing crew evaluations.

‘It was still hard for a while, but it kept getting a little better each time. Honestly, I still dread writing reports, but not how I used to. And mostly I still dictate them – I think that’s just what works best for me.’

‘You know,’ said Leeta, ‘at the orphanage they were so determined that we should learn to read and write. I couldn’t see the point. Wasn’t like we needed it to go work in a mine or whatever. I’m glad they made us, though. I would’ve missed out on a lot of good books.’ She tossed a sand pea in the air and caught it in her mouth. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there was one time at the orphanage that I did something I didn’t think I could.

‘It was when I was twelve or thirteen, I guess. There was a huge storm that swept right across the continent – Nerys, maybe you remember hearing about it – and the power was never that reliable anyway. It failed about an hour in, and us older kids helped the carers to light candles and calm the younger kids who were crying. They sent us to bed, but the little ones I shared a room with were too scared to sleep. We all piled onto the one bed together, and I told them stories to distract them from the storm.

‘After a while we heard a loud bang, and then crackling. The kids were screaming, so I went to see what it was, and it turned out a tree had been struck by lightning and part of the trunk had landed on the house, and the roof was so rotten that it had fallen straight through. It was burning, right there across the only path we had to the rest of the house.

‘I’d never been so scared in my life. I didn’t know what to do. The flames were already climbing the walls. I couldn’t see a way out. I yelled for help, but I knew nobody would be able to get through, and there was nowhere to get water on that end of the corridor.

‘I ran back to my room – I wasn’t thinking of doing anything except hiding under my bed and waiting for the fire to claim me – but the kids… they asked me what we were going to do, and they seemed so sure that I would know. They were all just looking at me, so trusting. I knew I had to at least try.

‘So I got them to take the sheets off the beds and we knotted them together, except one that we rolled up and put at the bottom of the door to stop the smoke, and we tested them by pulling them, and we tied the rope to the bed, and we managed to all climb out of the window and down to the ground. I had to make a few trips to carry the ones who were too small to manage it themselves – if I thought I’d been scared before, it was nothing to climbing back up again into a burning building, knowing they were up there waiting for me. But somehow we all got out, and by then someone had raised the alarm and everyone living nearby was out trying to help, even in the storm, even with the lightning still flashing.

‘One of the neighbours took me and the little ones in and gave us blankets and put us by the fire. I was sick for a week afterwards. Not sure if it was the cold and the rain or if it was just that I was so afraid. But you know, I’m prouder of what I did that day than almost anything else I’ve done before or since.’

‘You’re right to be,’ said Keiko.

Leeta smiled at her.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Deanna. ‘I think there’s no scarier feeling than knowing other people’s lives depend on you.’

* * *

It was a mediation mission, something Deanna and the captain had done together many times. They worked like clockwork now – she laying the groundwork with research into the culture and psychology of the parties, then a meeting where they talked strategy, and then, during the mediation itself, he took the lead while she kept detailed notes and supplied him with facts and figures and the occasional hint or idea about what would help change the tone of the discussion.

This time should have been the same. It was the same, at least at first. The mood in the room was hopeful, determined. It seemed as though the Antefrians and the Norites genuinely wanted to find a peaceful way to move forward together. The morning session was productive, and the afternoon was shaping up to be the same.

Nobody was sure afterwards how the Antefrian dissenters beamed into the compound, especially given that they were heavily armed. But before the security teams could react, they had taken two dozen Norite hostages – mostly support staff and low-ranking officials, in a protected area of the compound. Sensors in the area were down, and there were no windows. The security teams couldn’t get enough information to make storming in safe.

‘Deanna,’ the captain said, when he returned from his emergency call to Starfleet, ‘the soonest Starfleet can get a trained hostage negotiator here is next week. Clearly that won’t do. Are you up to date on that area of your training?’

‘I covered it extensively at the Academy, and I took a refresher course two years ago. But captain – I’ve never had to apply that knowledge to a real-life situation.’

‘You’re still the most qualified person on this planet to deal with this situation. What do we do, Commander?’

Deanna took a deep breath.

‘First of all, we need a way to communicate with them. I have to talk to them to know how to proceed. And I need to be physically close, so I can try to sense something from them. And I need a map of the compound, big enough to see the area they’ve taken in detail.’

‘You’ll get them,’ the captain promised.

‘Oh… and we need a perimeter around the area they’ve taken – can you find me someone to be my security liaison?’

‘I’ll take care of it.’

Three minutes later, Deanna was established in a small office adjoining the captured area, and a technician was patching a companel so that she could communicate with the one in the next room. Someone had scrambled and found a map, and technicians were working to try to get sensors working again.

‘You’re through,’ the technician said. ‘Just hold the control whenever you’re ready.’

Deanna’s palms were sweating. She waited for one long moment, slowing her breathing. She activated the channel.

‘This is Commander Deanna Troi, of the Enterprise,’ she said. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

There was a long pause, and Deanna sensed heightened fear and confusion from close by. She resisted the urge to speak again, counting the seconds as they passed. Finally, someone spoke.

‘We are the Coalition for Antefrian Independence,’ the voice said.

‘Thank you for responding to me,’ Deanna said, keeping her voice low and calm. ‘It’s good to know who I’m talking to. May I ask what your name is?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘All right. I understand that. You don’t have to share any information you don’t want to.’

She paused for a moment, opening her empathic sense again, trying to pinpoint this individual in the roiling mass of emotion close by. She couldn’t quite manage it.

‘May I ask,’ she continued, ‘what it is you want? I know you must have a good reason for taking these people captive. You need something, something that I could help you get. What is it?’

There was a pause.

‘You’re not a Norite,’ said the voice, eventually.

‘That’s right,’ said Deanna. ‘I’m not. I’m a member of Starfleet. I’m neutral in this conflict. I’m not on anybody’s side. I just want to find the solution that works best for everyone.’

He spat. ‘Ha! There is no solution that works for everyone, as long as the Antefrians refuse to acknowledge our grievances, as long as our own leaders are cowards who treat with our enemies!’

‘All right,’ said Deanna. ‘Then what is it you want?’

‘You can’t help us get it, Starfleet.’

‘If you don’t at least tell me, then I certainly can’t. But if you tell me what it is you need, I can ask on your behalf. Maybe there’s something I could do. Could it hurt to try?’

There was silence, corresponding with a spike of emotion from several people. They were almost certainly having an argument about how to respond. Deanna waited, trying to ignore how loud her pulse was in her ears.

‘We want an end to the peace talks,’ he said at last. ‘We will not tolerate cooperation with the Norites. They have killed our people for too long for us to reconcile with them now. And we want all of the territory they took from us returned, and every Antefrian prisoner of war released today. And…’ there was a muffled conference, and the voice continued with a little less certainty – ‘we want every Norite prisoner of war executed for their crimes.’

‘Is that everything?’ Deanna asked.

‘What else is there?’

‘Thank you for trusting me with this,’ said Deanna. ‘I’ll pass it on, make sure your voices are heard. You’ll have an answer soon. In the meantime, may I ask you something?’

‘What?’

‘Is there anyone in there who needs medical attention?’

Another pause. Another argument. Deanna thought she was focusing in a little on the one who was negotiating with her.

‘No,’ he said, at last, but he didn’t sound sure, and her empathic impression, growing clearer by the moment, told her the same.

‘I wouldn’t blame you,’ she said, ‘if someone got hurt, in the heat of the moment. But if anyone needs help, it can be provided. Your own people included. I just want everyone to be safe.’

‘None of them are dead,’ the voice said.

‘But some are injured?’

‘That’s not important.’

‘All right.’ Deanna relented. ‘I’m going to go and communicate what you’ve said to me, try to make sure your demands are listened to. I’ll be in touch again soon.’

The communication cut off. Deanna slumped back in her chair. The captain was suddenly there at her side.

‘That seems like a good start,’ he said.

Deanna sighed. ‘We’ll see. We don’t know how many of the hostages are injured, or how seriously. We’re not even sure how many hostage takers there are.’

‘There’s still a long way to go,’ he agreed. ‘Naturally we can’t give in to their demands, but this at least gives us a little time, a little room to manoeuvre.’

‘I just hope it makes a difference,’ Deanna said.

* * *

They waited an hour, to let the hostage takers calm down a little. Then Deanna contacted them again, promising that she was doing her best to arrange everything that they wanted.

‘It’ll take time,’ she said. ‘But I’m doing everything I can.’

She felt a flicker of hope from their representative – he wanted to believe her. He wanted to think that this could really work. He wanted to feel like a hero to his people. That was something she could use.

‘What did you say your name was?’ the voice asked.

‘I’m Commander Deanna Troi,’ she said. ‘But you can call me Deanna.’

A pause.

‘I’m Kareth.’

‘Thank you, Kareth.’

* * *

The hours went by slowly, progress coming in inches. Deanna stayed by the comm at all times, concentrating hard on Kareth’s words, the undercurrents of emotion beneath them, the mood of the hostage takers and the hostages. The captain, who was trying to at least arrange the release of the Antefrian prisoners of war, since that was the most reasonable demand, brought her a snack a few hours in, and a cup of tea later. The security team reported to her every twenty minutes, but not much changed. They still had no sensors in the area. The perimeter was secure. Deanna, stiff from sitting in the same position, tired from almost an entire day of negotiations and a long night of this, talked to Kareth, calm and patient, teasing information from him so slowly that he almost wasn’t aware of giving it up. In the middle of his rants about Antefrian superiority, she managed to discover that there were five hostage-takers to twenty-two hostages. She was well on the way to getting the injured hostages evacuated and rations for everyone, the hostage takers included.

Then, somewhere in the early hours of the morning, everything went wrong.

Kareth had signed off to clear the plan with the rest of his group, and when the comm link activated again, it wasn’t him on the line.

‘Kareth might be fooled by you,’ the new voice snarled, ‘but I’m not. You’re not getting us any closer to our aims. Kareth won’t be talking to you anymore. You’ll call again in an hour to tell us our demands are being met, and if you don’t, we’ll start to kill the hostages. One every half hour until we get what we want.’

The link terminated. Deanna let out a growl of frustration.

‘Does he mean it?’ the captain asked, by her side.

She nodded. ‘He’s serious. He’d kill someone. Kareth wouldn’t have, I don’t think. I was building a rapport with him, I was really getting somewhere. Dammit, all those hours, wasted!’

There were tears in her eyes, suddenly. She blinked them back. All that painstaking work, and she was right back where she’d started, only worse. And they were going to start killing the hostages, and it was her fault, because she hadn’t done enough.

‘Deanna,’ said the captain. His hand was on her shoulder. ‘I know you’re exhausted and frustrated, but what you’ve accomplished already is better than we could have hoped. The hostages are all still alive. We have valuable intelligence and you’ve built a relationship with one of the hostage takers. We haven’t lost this one yet, and I have every faith in you. The parameters have changed – so how can we apply what we’ve learned to this new situation?’

Deanna took a deep breath.

‘I can still sense Kareth,’ she said. ‘He feels wrong-footed and betrayed. Being the one to communicate with me made him feel powerful, he saw himself as the leader of the group, and now he feels like his own comrades have taken that power away. He feels uncomfortable about this new direction they’ve taken.’

‘Uncomfortable enough to help us?’

‘Perhaps… but without being able to actually communicate with him, it’s difficult to know. As for the other hostage takers… they’re divided. The one who spoke to me is determined, as is one of the others, but the remaining two aren’t sure about this course of action, now that the first rush of adrenaline has worn off. They’re anxious at the idea of being party to the hostages’ deaths. They thought this would be easier, that it would all be over by now and they’d be covered in glory. And they’re all tired. They’re afraid to let their guard down and they don’t know how much longer it will take. They’re scared.’

‘That sounds like something we could use.’

Deanna nodded. ‘If it came to a confrontation, the ones who want the hostages dead are outnumbered, but they’re also more desperate, and more impatient. I truly believe they will start killing hostages if we don’t do something within an hour. I don’t think further negotiation will help. I think we need to do something right now.’

They spent most of the next almost-hour in conference with the security teams, solidifying Deanna’s plan. By the time the hour was over, Deanna felt calm and ready. She activated the comm link.

‘What are you doing to meet our demands?’ the same voice as before asked.

‘I want to speak to Kareth again,’ Deanna said.

‘I already told you, Kareth isn’t talking to you anymore. Tell me what you’re doing or we start shooting.’

‘Kareth wouldn’t do this. He understands how to win an honourable victory. He knows the value of compromise. If Kareth is the leader I think he is, he won’t let you murder helpless people without even a trial.’

Deanna took a deep breath, measuring the emotions in the room. She nodded to the captain, who relayed a silent order.

The shouts came over the comm link as the security team burst into the room.

* * *

‘That was probably the longest two minutes of my life,’ Deanna said. ‘But it worked. Kareth turned against him, and two others joined him. It was enough. It was a close thing, but we saved all the hostages.’

Alyssa shuddered. ‘I can’t imagine doing something like that.’

‘Neither could I until I did it,’ Deanna grinned.

Kate leaned across the table to divide the last of the current bottle of spring wine equally between everyone’s glasses.

‘I guess,’ said Keiko, ‘the thing I could do that I thought I couldn’t was just… keep going.’

She paused and stared down into her drink for a moment, gathering herself.

‘I don’t know how many of you remember how badly damaged the arboretum on the Enterprise was, when the Borg attacked us. I spent that whole time in a designated shelter area, feeling the ship shake, not knowing what was happening – and we’d just heard about what had happened at Wolf 359, all the ships that were destroyed, the people who were killed. I had friends on some of those ships. I remember we waited for days to find out who had survived. And even on the Enterprise, we lost people. One of the young botanists in my department didn’t get to a shelter area on time. We would have held a memorial service in the arboretum, but it was such a mess. I walked in, after it was all over, and I walked through ashes. Plants were torn to pieces. A section of the hull was just patched over. The lights were still flickering. I turned around and walked straight out again.

‘I didn’t set foot in the arboretum for weeks after that. Spent all my time in my office on the lab deck, putting off decisions, concentrating on the experiments we were running in the miniature biospheres. I tried so hard not to think about the arboretum, or the battle, or the Borg. Miles and I were engaged by then, and we knew we wanted kids, and I kept thinking about how dangerous it was on the Enterprise, how close we’d come to being blown to pieces. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. I thought I might leave, even though I didn’t know what that would mean for me and Miles. I wanted to run all the way back to Earth and hide in my old bedroom at my mother’s house. But then, Earth wasn’t safe either, was it? The Borg had gotten so close.

‘And I’d worked for years on that arboretum. I’d built it from the ground up. It was mine. It was mine and the Borg had destroyed it.

‘So I sat in my lab and yelled at my staff and got nothing done for a few weeks. I kept getting angrier and angrier. I kept not getting any sleep. Every day I tinkered with my resignation letter, wondering if this time I’d actually hand it in. And then one night, I just got out of bed, at three in the morning, and walked straight to the arboretum before I could change my mind. Didn’t even change out of my pyjamas. Didn’t even put shoes on.

‘They’d repaired the lighting by then, but it was set to night levels. I asked the computer for full illumination. It was so bright it hurt. It would have hurt to look anyway. A clean-up crew had been assigned – the hull was repaired, and the dead plants and debris had been taken away. The ash was gone from the floor. But it was a shell. Just a box. It smelled wrong.

‘I think that moment I could have just as easily decided to leave, and I wouldn’t be sitting here now. I’d have taken a post on Earth, or somewhere else far away, and I’d never have known half the people here. But… I don’t know, something took over, some instinct. I went to the replicator in the lab next door, and started replicating some new frames for flower beds. And I sat down and I started sketching a new layout – there were some things I hadn’t been entirely happy with the first time, and I decided to correct them, to do something different instead of trying to make it the same as it was before. And I replicated some soil, and I went to the lab and got some seeds, and I planted them, and I watered them.

‘I worked by myself for a few days. I wouldn’t let anyone else in. Eventually some of my team came down to see where I’d been hiding myself all week.

‘I thought I didn’t want anyone else to see it until it was done. I wanted to fix it all up myself. But once they were there, I realised that it was better that way. It was better if we all did it together.

‘So I organised a schedule – everyone spent half their working hours helping to get the arboretum back into shape. And we decided to get the children involved. They came and helped water the flowers and transplant seedlings. And the PADD with my letter of resignation on it fell down the back of the couch. And I kept going, and eventually things were better.’

Jadzia reached over to squeeze Keiko’s hand.

The lights on the Promenade outside cycled back up to their daytime level.

‘Morning already?’ Kate asked.

Nerys gasped. ‘I have Ops in half an hour!’

‘And I need to start opening up for the breakfast crowd soon,’ said Leeta.

Nobody got up for a minute.

‘Let’s all do this again,’ said Alyssa. ‘When the war’s over.’

Nobody was sure afterwards who started it, but somehow they were all holding hands, in one chain all around the table. They held on for a few moments, quiet, looking at one another, and then Guinan stood up.

‘Take care of yourselves, OK?’ she said.

There were hugs and handshakes and promises to keep in touch. Deanna, Beverly and Alyssa followed Guinan back to the Enterprise. Kate went in the opposite direction, to her own ship. Nerys and Jadzia took the turbolift to Ops. Keiko and Kasidy walked together towards the Habitat Ring.

Leeta sat at the table for another few seconds, enjoying the calm before the storm. Then she stood up, went downstairs to the bar, and started taking the chairs down from the tables. Time to face the day.


End file.
